The Lost Bookshop: The most charming and uplifting novel for 2024 and the perfect gift for book lovers!

Chapter One

OPALINE

London, 1921

Ilet my fingers run along the spine of the book, letting the indentations of the embossed cover guide my skin to something tangible; something that I believed in more than the fiction that was playing out before me. Twenty-one years of age and my mother had decided that the time had come for me to marry. My brother, Lyndon, had rather unhelpfully found some dim-witted creature who had just inherited the family business; something to do with importing something or other from some far-flung place. I was barely listening.

‘There are only two options open to a woman your age,’ Mother pronounced, putting down her cup and saucer on the table beside her armchair. ‘One is to marry, and the other to find a post in keeping with her gentility.’

‘Gentility?’ I echoed, with some incredulity. Looking around the drawing room with its chipped paint and faded curtains, I had to admire her vanity. She had married beneath her station and had always been at pains to remind my father, lest he forgot.

‘Must you do that now?’ my brother Lyndon asked, as Mrs Barrett, our housemaid, cleared out the ashes from the grate.

‘Madam requested a fire,’ she said in a tone that showed no inflexion of respect. She had been with us for as long as I could remember and only took orders from my mother. The rest of us she treated like cheap imposters.

‘The fact of the matter is that you must marry,’ Lyndon parroted as he limped across the room, leaning heavily on his walking stick. Twenty years my elder, the entire right side of his body had been warped by shrapnel during the war in Flanders and the brother I once knew stayed buried somewhere in that very field. The horrors he held in his eyes frightened me, and even though I didn’t like to admit it, I had grown fearful of him. ‘This is a good match. Father’s pension is barely enough for Mother to run the house. It’s time you took your head out of your books and faced reality.’

I clung tighter to my book. A rare first American edition of Wuthering Heights, a gift from my father, along with a deep love of reading. Like a talisman, I had carried the cloth-covered book, whose spine bore the duplicitous line, tooled in gold, ‘by the author of Jane Eyre’. We had come across it by complete chance at a flea market in Camden (a secret we could not tell Mother). I would later discover that Emily’s English publisher had permitted this misattribution in order to capitalise on Jane Eyre’s commercial success. It was not in perfect condition; the cloth boards were worn on the edges and the back one had a v-shape nicked out of it. The pages were coming loose, as the threads that sewed them together were fraying with age and use. But to me, all of these features, including the cigar-smoke smell of the paper, were like a time machine. Perhaps the seeds were sown then. A book is never what it seems. I think my father had hoped my love of books would instil an interest in my schooling, but if anything, it only fuelled my loathing for the classroom. I tended to live in my imagination and so, every evening, I would race home from school and ask him to read to me. He was a civil servant, an honest man with a passion for learning. He always said that books were more than words on paper; they were portals to other places, other lives. I fell in love with books and the vast worlds they held inside, and I owed it all to my father. ‘If you tilt your head,’ he told me once, ‘you can hear the older books whispering their secrets.’

I found an antique book on the shelf with a calfskin cover and time-coloured pages. I held it up to my ear and closed my eyes tight; imagining that I could hear whatever important secrets the author was trying to tell me. But I couldn’t hear it, not the words at least.

‘What do you hear?’ he asked.

I waited, let the sound fill my ears.

‘I hear the sea!’

It was like having a shell to my ear, with the air swirling through the pages. He smiled and held my cheek in his hand.

‘Are they breathing, Papa?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the stories are breathing.’

When he finally succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918, I stayed up all night by his side, holding his cold hand, reading his favourite story. The Personal History of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. In some silly way, I thought that the words would bring him back.

‘I refuse to marry a man I’ve never even met purely to aid the family finances. The whole idea is preposterous!’

Mrs Barrett dropped the brush as I spoke and the sound of metal on marble churned my brother’s features. He loathed any loud noises.

‘Get out of here now!’

The poor woman had very unreliable knees and it took three failed attempts before she got up and left the room. How she managed to refrain from slamming the door behind her, I will never know. I continued with my defence.

‘If I am such a burden to you both, I will simply move out.’

‘And where on earth do you think you would go? You have no money,’ my mother pointed out. Now in her sixties, she had always referred to my arrival in the family as their ‘little surprise’, which would have sounded quaint had I not been aware of her loathing for surprises. Growing up in a household of an older generation only compounded my urge to break free and experience the modern world.