By Jenny Colgan
Released: September 20, 2016
William Morrow
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.
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.
Nina Redmond was a 29 year old bookworm, working as a librarian…well
she was until cut backs happened, and she lost her position in the small, but
hectic branch library, and thrust into a
competition into securing her job at the main library in the center of
Birmingham. But while talking to her ex co-workers, the idea of having a book
bus pops into her head. So she starts looking through the paper for a bus. But
when she finds one that is within her price range, it's in Scotland.
But when fate works against her, and Nina doesn't get the job at the
main library, or the permit to park the bus she intends to buy (if she can
convince the owner to send it to her), for use in Birmingham. Nina gets the
courage to move to where the bus is…in Kirrinfirf, Scotland.
Nina was thrilled to find a new home in a stunning barn conversion, the
only upset was her gorgeous, but grumpy landlord, Lennox, who was going through
a particularly nasty divorce. And now set about working on her book bus, with
the help of her friends Marek and Jim who drive the night train, whom bring her
books from her ex co-worker and friend Griffin. But what she didn’t expect was
for them to bring her ex roommate and friend Surinder. And then Nina's life
really gets started.
I'm going to finish my rehash there, but I will assure you, that we
follow Nina on this journey of finding herself and a community, lust,
heartbreak, conflict, success and happiness and I enjoyed every second of it.
In 2001 I read my first Jenny Colgan's book called Looking For Andrew
McCarthy, I sat in Greenwich Park, enjoying the book and thought it was funny,
but age of 21, I honestly didn't appreciate such talent of the author, only the
happily ever after. Now 15 years later, I opened The Bookshop on the Corner,
and within the first few pages, I was back, sitting in that park laughing my
head off like a fool, but this time I recognized the sheer talent of the
author; how she managed to suck me back to my homeland, laughing at the
British-isms and remembering how much I struggled to understand my Aunt Ellie,
with her thick Scottish brogue. The authors writing is truly smooth, refreshing
and intoxicating. Being a British expat, I have had to retrain myself to read
American "English" rather than British English, so I quite often
struggle with books written by British authors, but with this author I didn't
have any of these issues; so it's very American friendly.
When it comes to the plot and the characters, I honestly couldn't
separate them from the story. When it comes to Nina and her journey…it
basically comes down to, she is everything thing I wish I could be and have!
Including darker nights in winter. Seriously! I know she is a character, but I
want her life (sorry hubby), including that scene in front of the fire *swoon*
I honestly could sit here for hours telling you how much I love The
Bookshop on the Corner, but let me just sum it up quickly! It's amazing and you
must read it!!!
I give The Bookshop on the Corner 5 stars!
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.
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