THE LOST BOOKSHOP

EVIE WOODS
 One More Chapter
a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2023

Copyright © Evie Woods 2023

Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2023

Cover photographs © Stephen Mulcahey/Trevillion Images (house);
Shutterstock.com (all other images)

Evie Woods asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents
portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

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invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008646042

Ebook Edition © June 2023 ISBN: 9780008609207
Version: 2023-04-17
To all the book lovers
 Contents

Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
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 Prologue

T he rainy streets of Dublin on a cold winter’s day were no place for a

young boy to dawdle, unless that very same boy had his nose pressed up
against the window of the most fascinating bookshop. Lights twinkled
inside and the colourful covers called to him, promising stories of adventure
and escape. The window was packed with novelties and trinkets; miniature
hot-air balloons almost reached the ceiling, while music boxes with
mechanical birds and carousels twirled and chimed within. The lady inside
spotted him and waved him in. He shook his head and blushed slightly.
‘I’ll be late for school,’ he mouthed through the glass.
She nodded and smiled. She seemed friendly enough.
‘Just for a minute,’ he said, having fought the urge to go inside for all of
three seconds.
‘A minute it is.’ She was behind the counter, taking more books out of a
big cardboard box. She glanced over at his untucked shirt, his mop of hair
that had managed to evade a comb for quite some time and mismatched
socks. She smiled to herself. Opaline’s Bookshop was a magnet for little
boys and girls. ‘What class are you in?’
‘Third class in St Ignatius,’ he replied, craning his neck to look up at the
wooden airplanes suspended mid-flight from the vaulted ceiling.
‘And do you like it?’
 He scoffed at the thought.
She left him leafing through an old book of magic tricks, but it wasn’t
long until he approached her desk and began looking at the stationery.
‘You can help if you like. I’m sending out invitations to a book launch.’
He shrugged and began mimicking the way she folded the letters and
stuffed them into the envelopes with a little too much enthusiasm. He
wrinkled his nose with the effort, changing the constellation of freckles that
spread out to his cheeks.
‘What does Opaline mean?’ he asked, pronouncing it with far too many
syllables.
‘Opaline is a name.’
‘Is it your name?’
‘No, I’m Martha.’
She could tell that he wasn’t satisfied with that as an explanation.
‘I can tell you a story about her, if you like? She didn’t like school very
much either. Or rules.’
‘Or doing what she’s told?’ he suggested.
‘Oh, she especially didn’t like that.’ Martha smiled conspiratorially.
‘Here, you finish jamming those letters into envelopes and I’ll make us
some tea. A good story always begins with tea.’
 Chapter One
OPALINE

London, 1921
I let 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. Eighteen
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.
‘I have friends,’ I insisted. ‘I could get a job.’
My mother shrieked.
‘Damn and blast, you ungrateful brat!’ Lyndon growled, grabbing my
wrist as I attempted to get up from my chair.
‘You’re hurting me.’
‘I will hurt you far worse than this if you do not obey.’
I tried to free my arm, but he held fast. I looked to my mother, who was
making an intense study of the rug on the floor.
‘I see,’ I said, finally understanding that Lyndon was the man of the
house now and he would make the decisions.
‘Very well.’ He still held on to my wrist, his sour breath in my face. ‘I
said, very well.’
Meeting his eyes, I again tried to pull away. ‘I will meet this suitor.’
‘You will marry him,’ he assured me and slowly he released his grasp.
I smoothed down my skirts and tucked my book under my arm.
‘Right. That’s settled then,’ Lyndon said, his cold eyes looking
somewhere just beyond me. ‘I shall invite Austin to supper this evening and
all will be arranged.’
‘Yes, Brother,’ I said, before retreating to my bedroom upstairs.
I searched the top drawer of the dressing table and found a cigarette that I’d
stolen from Mrs Barrett’s stash in the kitchen. I opened the window and lit
the tip, taking a long slow inhale like a femme fatale from the films. I sat at
my dressing table and let the cigarette rest on an old oyster shell I had
picked up at the beach last summer, a carefree holiday with my best friend
Jane before she herself got married. Despite the fact that women now had
the vote, a good marriage was still seen as the only option.
Looking at my reflection in the mirror, I touched the nape of my neck
where my hair ended. Mother had almost fainted when she saw what I’d
done with my long tresses. ‘I’m not a little girl any more,’ I had told her.
But did I really believe that? I needed to be a modern woman. I needed to
take a risk. But without any money, how could I do anything other than
obey my elders? That was when my father’s words returned to me … Books
are like portals. I looked again at my bookshelf and took another long drag
of my cigarette.
‘What would Nellie Bly do?’ I asked myself, as I often did. To me, she
was the epitome of fearlessness – a pioneering American journalist who,
inspired by Jules Verne’s book, travelled around the world in a mere
seventy-two days, six hours and eleven minutes. She always said that
energy rightly applied and directed could accomplish anything. If I were a
boy, I could announce my intentions to do the Grand Tour of Europe before
getting married. I longed to experience different cultures. Twenty-one years
old and I had done nothing. Seen nothing. I looked again at my books and
made my decision before I finished smoking my cigarette.

‘How much can you give me for them?’ I watched as Mr Turton examined
my hardbacks of Wuthering Heights and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
 He was the proprietor of an airless shop that was in reality just a very
long corridor without any windows. His pipe smoke gave the air a viscous
quality and my eyes began to water.
‘Two pounds and that’s being generous.’
‘Oh no, I need much more than that.’
He saw my father’s copy of David Copperfield and before I could stop
him, he began to leaf through the pages.
‘I’m not selling that one. It has … sentimental value.’
‘Ah, now this is interesting. It is known as the “reading edition”, as
Dickens would have read from it at his public readings.’ His bulbous nose
and tiny eyes gave him the look of a badger or a mole. He sniffed out the
valuable book like a truffle.
‘Yes, I am aware,’ I said, trying to snatch the book back from his greedy
paws. He continued with his appraisal, as though he were already selling it
at auction.
‘Sumptuously bound in full polished red calf. A charming edition;
ornate tooling in gilt to the spine; all page edges gilt; original marbled
endpapers.’
‘My father gifted me that book. It is not for sale.’
He looked at me over the rim of his glasses, sizing me up. ‘Miss …?’
‘Miss Carlisle.’
‘Miss Carlisle, this is one of the best-preserved examples of these rare
issues I have ever handled. ‘
‘And the illustrations by Hablot K. Browne. You see his pen name,
Phiz,’ I added, with pride.
‘I could offer you fifteen pounds.’
The world fell silent, the way it often does the moment before a life-
changing decision. On one path lay freedom along with the unknown. The
other was a gilded cage.
‘Twenty pounds, Mr Turton, and you have a deal.’
 He narrowed his eyes and his lips betrayed a grudging smile. I knew he
would pay, just as surely as I knew that I would devote my life to getting
that book back. As his back was turned, I slipped my Wuthering Heights
back into my pocket and left.
That was how my career as a book dealer began.