Chapter 1: Another Beginning
This is the story of how a plain woman, middle-aged, too, and all too clearly going nowhere fast (behind her, a failed career, failed relationships, failure) boarded a plane from her native America to England to arrive at the other end with an undreamed of future ahead of her.
A future which would involve marrying the Englishman she had just met high above the Atlantic and eventually creating with him a bookshop in a small market town she had never heard of, in a county she had never heard of, in the far North East of England.
A bookshop that would eventually cover more than 8000 sq ft. within a still magnificent old Victorian railway station, stock well over a quarter of a million books, and attract more than 200,000 customers a year.
A bookshop which one famous writer (you’ll meet him later) would call ‘the best secondhand bookshop known to man’.
Not bad!
She didn’t know it then, of course.
She does now.
How do I knowω
Because that woman is me.