The Last Bookshop In London Novels & Stories

he said. I looked out the window. “There’s a bookshop,” I said. “Two streets from the market. So small you have to turn sideways in the aisles. I bought two books I didn’t need.” “What kind.” “One about a woman who builds boats. One about a city that doesn’t exist.” He made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Of course.” “Of course what.” “You’d find the one bookshop,” he said. “In the whole city. First month.”

Then she put the new book down. “I would like to read something older,” she said. “From the third novel. The last four pages. For the person who has been keeping it on her staff picks shelf.” Sera felt the back of her neck grow warm. She read the ending of The Cartographer’s Daughter without looking at the book. She knew it by heart. The room was absolutely still. At the last paragraph, the specific last sentence that Sera had once read aloud to herself in the shop after closing, her voice changed, something quieter in it.

“Need me to show you back upstairs?” I hadn’t heard from Caleb that his meeting with Ed Dingle was done, so I needed to bide my time. “Er, no. I actually need to run an errand for Mr Wolfe. He said there’s a bookshop nearby?” He hadn’t, but he’d told me to make myself scarce, and since I wasn’t going to tell my new friend, as much as I liked her, why I needed to go, I needed to come up with some bullshit. “Yeah. It’s two streets over to the right. Waterstones.”

Mom opened the sketchbook, glanced at it, and started ripping. Hard. The sharp tear of paper filled the room. "No! Mom, don't!" I lunged for her, but my hands cut through empty air. I dropped to the floor, shaking, staring at the scraps everywhere. I couldn't even cry anymore. When the sketchbook was shredded, Mom stood there, catching her breath. Then she walked out and shut the door behind her. Leaving me alone with the torn pages. *** Mom's phone rang again. The driver. He begged her not to call the cops. Said he'd pay whatever it took.

When you were sick of someone, even coffee made the way she made it tasted disgusting. I blocked everyone from Lundberg Corp. None of it mattered now.

I just walk and let the city decide where I end up and for the first twenty minutes I do not go into anything, I just move, and it feels so good I almost stop in the middle of the pavement to appreciate it. I find a bookshop on a street I have never been down. Small, crammed, the kind where books are stacked on top of other books because there is not enough shelf space for all of them. I go in and I spend a long time in there, longer than I planned, picking things up and reading the first page and putting them back down and picking up other things. Nobody talks to me. Nobody needs anything from me. I am just a woman in a bookshop on a Thursday and it is the most peaceful I have felt in a mon

By the time we get back to my place, I’m so horny I nearly rip my dress off. The next day, he takes me to an old bookstore that has been run by the same owner for over sixty years. She refuses to alphabetize anything, but when Damien asks her for a specific book, she knows exactly where it is. It’s cramped and crowded, full of volumes of rare old books and gorgeous hardback covers. Damien buys sme a copy of Pride and Prejudice in French.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so relieved to set foot on regular pavement. After about fifteen minutes trying to get the events of this morning out of my head and convincing myself I’m just conjuring up things that aren’t really there and driving myself nuts due to lack of decent sleep, I step into Jackson’s auto-repair shop where I’m met with the smell of gasoline, oil and stale cigarettes. The shop is dimly lit and the main focus of the space is a car lift positioned in the center. A large sedan perched atop, held in place by the big sturdy looking metal arms, the car is halfway disassembled, revealing it’s inner workings like a mechanical puzzle waiting to be solved. Around the shop, tools

The only thing we knew was that she was an Ultimate Seer— which, mind you, we learnt from her own lips. So, it's very safe to say we don't know anything about her. Anything at all. “Fuck it,” I let out, walking to the bathroom. I cleaned up and headed for the bookshop. What's the worst that could happen? Okay, a lot, but still, it was worth trying. I arrived at the bookshop and opened up. Sherry told me that a lot of people were disappointed that the store was closed for days. "Why not get an assistant?" Sherry asked, as she followed me into the shop, settling as I closed up the window and turned on the AC.