THE BOOKSHOP ON
THE CORNER
By Jenny Colgan
William
Morrow Paperbacks
September
20, 2016
ISBN: 9780062467256; $14.99
E-ISBN 9780062467263; $9.99
Nina Redmond is a literary
matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also
her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic
city. But now the job she loved is no more.
Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away. There she buys a van and transforms it into a bookmobile—a mobile bookshop that she drives from neighborhood to neighborhood, changing one life after another with the power of storytelling.
From helping her grumpy landlord deliver a lamb, to sharing picnics with a charming train conductor who serenades her with poetry, Nina discovers there’s plenty of adventure, magic, and soul in a place that’s beginning to feel like home… a place where she just might be able to write her own happy ending.
The
problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise
themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn’t it, whenever you’re
going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the
shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, it’s completely worth it. It seems like
absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end,”
and you could say, “Thank you, Fairy Godmother.” You might also say, “Will I
also lose that seven pounds?” and they would say, “But of course, my child!”
That would be useful, but it isn’t how
it is, which is why we sometimes plow on too long with things that aren’t
making us happy, or give up too quickly on something that might yet work itself
out, and it is often difficult to tell precisely which is which.
A life lived forward can be a really
irritating thing. So Nina thought, at any rate. Nina Redmond, twenty-nine, was
telling herself not to cry in public. If you have ever tried giving yourself a
good talking-to, you’ll know it doesn’t work terribly well. She was at work,
for goodness’ sake. You weren’t meant to cry at work.
She wondered if anyone else ever did.
Then she wondered if maybe everyone did, even Cathy Neeson, with her stiff too-blond
hair, and her thin mouth and her spreadsheets, who was right at this moment
standing in a corner, watching the room with folded arms and a grim expression,
after delivering to the small team Nina was a member of a speech filled with jargon
about how there were cutbacks all over, and Birmingham couldn’t afford to
maintain all its libraries, and how austerity was something they just had to
get used to.
Nina reckoned probably not. Some
people just didn’t have a tear in them.
(What Nina didn’t know was that Cathy
Neeson cried on the way to work, on the way home from work—after eight o’clock most
nights—every time she laid someone off, every time she was asked to shave
another few percent off an already skeleton budget, every time she was ordered
to produce some new quality relevant paperwork, and every time her boss dumped
a load of administrative work on her at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon on
his way to a skiing vacation, of which he took many.
Eventually she ditched the entire
thing and went and worked in a National Trust gift shop for a fifth of the
salary and half the hours and none of the tears. But this story is not about
Cathy Neeson.)
It was just, Nina thought, trying to
squash down the lump in her throat . . . it was just that they had been such a
little library.
Children’s story time Tuesday and
Thursday mornings. Early closing Wednesday afternoon. A shabby old-fashioned
building with tatty linoleum floors. A little musty sometimes, it was true. The
big dripping radiators could take a while to get going of a morning and then
would become instantly too warm, with a bit of a fug, particularly off old Charlie
Evans, who came in to keep warm and read the Morning Star cover to cover, very
slowly. She wondered where the Charlie Evanses of the world would go now.
Cathy Neeson had explained that they
were going to compress the library services into the center of town, where they
would become a “hub,” with a “multimedia experience zone” and a coffee shop and
an “intersensory experience,” whatever that was, even though town was at least
two bus trips too far for most of their elderly or strollered-up clientele.
Their lovely, tatty, old pitched-roof
premises were being sold off to become executive apartments that would be well
beyond the reach of a librarian’s salary. And Nina Redmond, twenty-nine,
bookworm, with her long tangle of auburn hair, her pale skin with freckles
dotted here and there, and a shyness that made her blush—or want to burst into
tears—at the most inopportune moments, was, she got the feeling, going to be
thrown out into the cold winds of a world that was getting a lot of unemployed
librarians on the market at the same time.
“So,” Cathy Neeson had concluded, “you
can pretty much get started on packing up the ‘books’ right away.”
She said “books” like it was a word
she found distasteful in her shiny new vision of Mediatech Services. All those
grubby, awkward books.
—
Nina
dragged herself into the back room with a heavy heart and a slight redness
around her eyes. Fortunately, everyone else looked more or less the same way.
Old Rita O’Leary, who should probably have retired about a decade ago but was
so kind to their clientele that everyone overlooked the fact that she couldn’t
see the numbers on the Dewey Decimal System anymore and filed more or less at
random, had burst into floods, and Nina had been able to cover up her own
sadness comforting her.
“You know who else did this?” hissed
her colleague Griffin through his straggly beard as she made her way through.
Griffin was casting a wary look at Cathy Neeson, still out in the main area as
he spoke. “The Nazis. They packed up all the books and threw them onto
bonfires.”
“They’re not throwing them onto
bonfires!” said Nina. “They’re not actually Nazis.”
“That’s what everyone thinks. Then
before you know it, you’ve got Nazis.”
—
With
breathtaking speed, there’d been a sale, of sorts, with most of their clientele
leafing through old familiar favorites in the ten pence box and leaving the
shinier, newer stock behind.
Now, as the days went on, they were
meant to be packing up the rest of the books to ship them to the central
library, but Griffin’s normally sullen face was looking even darker than usual.
He had a long, unpleasantly scrawny beard, and a scornful attitude toward
people who didn’t read the books he liked. As the only books he liked were obscure
1950s out-of-print stories about frustrated young men who drank too much in
Fitzrovia, that gave him a lot of time to hone his attitude. He was still talking
about book burners.
“They won’t get burned! They’ll go to
the big place in town.”
Nina couldn’t bring herself to even
say Mediatech.
Griffin snorted. “Have you seen the
plans? Coffee, computers, DVDs, plants, admin offices, and people doing
cost–benefit analysis and harassing the unemployed—sorry, running ‘mindfulness workshops.’
There isn’t room for a book in the whole damn place.” He gestured at the dozens
of boxes. “This will be landfill. They’ll use it to make roads.”
“They won’t!”
“They will! That’s what they do with
dead books, didn’t you know? Turn them into underlay for roads. So great big
cars can roll over the top of centuries of thought and ideas and scholarship, metaphorically
stamping a love of learning into the dust with their stupid big tires and
blustering Top Gear idiots killing
the
planet.”
“You’re not in the best of moods this
morning, are you, Griffin?”
“Could you two hurry it along a bit
over there?” said Cathy Neeson, bustling in, sounding anxious. They only had
the budget for the collection trucks for one afternoon; if they didn’t manage to
load everything up in time, she’d be in serious trouble.
“Yes, Commandant Über-Führer,” said
Griffin under his breath as she bustled out again, her blond bob still rigid.
“God, that woman is so evil it’s unbelievable.”
But Nina wasn’t listening. She was
looking instead in despair at the thousands of volumes around her, so hopeful
with their beautiful covers and optimistic blurbs. To condemn any of them to
waste disposal seemed heartbreaking: these were books! To Nina it was like
closing down an animal shelter. And there was no way they were going to get it
all done today, no matter what Cathy Neeson thought.
Which was how, six hours later, when
Nina’s Mini Metro pulled up in front of the front door of her tiny shared
house, it was completely and utterly stuffed with volumes.
Praise for Jenny Colgan and THE
BOOKSHOP ON THE CORNER:
“Losing
myself in Jenny Colgan’s beautiful pages is the most delicious, comforting,
satisfying treat I have had in ages.”
— Jane Green, New York Times bestselling
author of Summer Secrets
“With a
keen eye for the cinematic, Colgan (Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery, 2016,
etc.) is a deft mistress of romantic comedy; Nina's story is laced with clever
dialogue and scenes set like jewels, just begging to be filmed. A charming, bracingly
fresh happily-ever-after tale…”
— Kirkus
“This is a lovely novel with amazing
characters who are hooked on books… at least some of them. The plot is
believable and is a joy to read. The main female character, Nina, is the
librarian who always figures out the best choice for a patron without fail.
Jenny Colgan thinks outside the box and creates a memorable book.”
— RT Book Reviews
“This
charming tale celebrates the many ways books bring people together”
— Booklist
“This
light, fresh romantic comedy is the perfect escape for bibliophiles. Enjoy it
with a cup of tea on a crisp day.”
— Real Simple
“[A] love
story about reading and the joys books can bring to people’s lives.”
— All About Romance
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