Prologue
Twenty-six years ago
Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Libby who travelled to a hundred different worlds and lived a thousand different lives just by opening the pages of a book and discovering the magic in the pages.
‘There’s no greater gift that you can give someone than a love of reading,’ her grandad, Ernie, had told her.
She blinked up at him as she sat on his lap, the wool of his much loved and worse for wear cardigan scratchy against her bare arms.
‘Where were we with this one?’ he asked her, flicking through the yellowing pages of the latest book he had picked up in the charity shop for her.
He believed that books should be loved. They should look loved and lived in. He loved folded down corners, and broken spines. He loved notes scrawled in the margins. Signs that a book had been pored over, read, devoured.
‘I think,’ Libby said, using her small hands to turn the pages herself, ‘we were just about here…’ She pointed to a page with a fresh fold at the top.
‘I think you might just be right, Libby,’ her grandad laughed, ‘right at the point where Mr and Mrs Twit are about to get their comeuppance!’
Libby felt a swell of excitement. She couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. She couldn’t wait to see the awful Twits with their awful ways come undone.
‘When we’re finished,’ she said, ‘can you tell me one of your stories? From when you were wee?’ Libby may well have loved the stories in these books, but she loved her grandad’s stories just as much.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was thinking we could go to the bookshop and see if we can pick up a new book or two?’
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his stubbly cheek. ‘Can we really?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine, Libby, if we owned a bookshop? How amazing would that be? All those books.’
‘I’d never ever leave it, ever,’ she said.
‘No, I don’t think I would either.’ Her grandad smiled. ‘Maybe one day we will. But first let’s find out what happens to the Twits.’
Libby nodded, lay her head against her grandad’s chest and watched his finger move along under the words on the page as he read to her. And the story came to life before her eyes.
1
Great Expectations
Libby hadn’t slept at all well. A fizz of something – excitement or nerves, or maybe both – had kept her awake most of the night.
She was finally doing it. Chasing her dream. The dream she had shared for years with her beloved grandad. Her heart ached a little when she thought of him, but she knew he wasn’t really gone. He was still beside her. He always would be.
She’d assured herself of that as she reached for her very battered copy of Great Expectations and started to read through it. She could almost hear his voice as she read, remembering the first time he had opened the book – which was already well-loved, its spine broken, pages yellowed – and read it to her. Inviting her into the world of Pip and Estella and the incomparable Miss Havisham.
Nodding to the picture of her grandfather, Ernie, which sat on the dresser of her childhood bedroom, Libby stopped reading long enough to whisper: ‘We’re doing it, Grandad. We’re finally doing it.’
When she eventually put the book down, still much too early for any right-minded person to be getting up, she stepped into the shower and allowed herself to mentally run through the to-do list in her head.
First of all – pick up the keys. That was the most important bit. That was the bit that made her stomach somersault. That was the bit that allowed her to push all and any worries about what she might find when she finally opened the doors to her new property on Ivy Lane aside.
Sure, the shop didn’t look like much now. In fact, it looked, from the outside, as if it might be better to knock it to the ground and start again. But Libby could see past the chipped rendering, the peeling paint in the window frames and the yellowed newspaper lining the inside of the windows of the corner-plot premises. She could even see past the broken downpipe from the upstairs flat, and the overflowing guttering which looked like it housed its own ecosystem. She could close her eyes and imagine what it could be.
As soon as her best friend Jess had called her, telling her the shop she had often dreamed of owning was finally up for auction, Libby had known exactly what she wanted to do with it.
She wanted to do exactly what she had always talked about with her grandad. What they’d always said they’d like to do ‘someday’ but never really thought they could – not when life became more about being sensible than taking risks.
Libby Quinn was tired of being sensible. Of never taking risks. There was a yearning for something more inside her and this was her chance to try and find it. She’d turn the ramshackle shop into her very own slice of heaven – where the heady smell of books would mix with the warm aroma of coffee and cake – and a welcoming atmosphere for everyone who crossed her threshold. She’d create an oasis of calm in this little side street for book lovers just like her.
The timing of Jess’s phone call couldn’t have been better. Libby had been tending Grandad Ernie’s grave and telling him all her news, as she did every week. She’d been asking him for a sign about what to do with her life next, when her phone had buzzed to life.
Tears had pricked at her eyes as Jess spoke, and Libby had felt goosebumps rise on her skin. ‘It’s our shop, Grandad,’ she’d said, once she’d ended the call. ‘The one we said would make the perfect bookshop!’
And it was, it was the very building, replete with original stone fascia and cornicing, wooden framed windows that they had said would be ripe for loving redevelopment. Ivy Lane was coming back to life, thanks to the growth of the nearby university campus but also the increased numbers of visitors flocking to Derry each year to soak up its history and culture.
Grandad Ernie had called it. He’d said it would come into its own and he’d been right. Libby could see that. It mightn’t be just there yet – which had to be a good thing when it came to the price of the shop – but it was well on its way.
And now she had the means, and the drive, to see if she could make it work. The guide price had been comfortably within her means. Well, it would be, Libby had figured, once she sold the terraced house she had bought as soon as she’d been able to scrape together a deposit and had lovingly restored. Added to the generous inheritance Grandad Ernie had left for her, and the redundancy package she’d just received after thirteen years of dutiful service to an insurance company now intent on going digital, she’d realised she stood a chance.
So, she’d wasted no time in getting the house up for sale. Thankfully, the market was in her favour, and in a matter of just days, she had a cash buyer lined up and was making plans to temporarily move back in with her parents.
She’d marked the day of the auction of number 15 Ivy Lane in her calendar and didn’t allow herself to think too much about what would happen if she was outbid. She had to believe it was meant to be hers.
She’d half expected her parents to tell her she had lost her mind. But they hadn’t. ‘Well, I think that’s just perfect,’ her father had said, growing misty-eyed as she outlined her plans for the shop. ‘It’s exactly what Grandad would have wanted for you.’