Now he was gone. He’d taken the boat train to Paris to start a new life without her. Yes, he’d promised to write once he’d settled, but that had been in January and now it was April and she still hadn’t heard.

The bookshop stood on a side street squeezed amongst a row of shops and cafes. Two storeys, it had darkly painted walls and a rusty sign that read:

THOMAS LITTLETON BOOKSELLER

BOOKS BOUGHT AND SOLD

RARE AND SECOND HAND

The window on the ground floor was so crammed with books it was difficult to see inside. Fairy lights circled the pane and a forgotten nativity scene nestled in the corner, giving the impression of a shabby Christmas card or an old-fashioned etching in a book.

Connie opened the door. She blinked, letting her eyes get used to the gloom. Her father leaned at the counter, and so did Victor Wallace. She considered slipping away, but decided against it. If her father was conducting business with Victor, it was better that she stayed.

The shop smelled of ink and old paper. It was narrow, with a wooden counter along the rear wall and, behind that, a doorway to the back room. At the far end of the counter, on the right, a staircase led to the first floor. A fairly reliable grandfather clock and a small cabinet of rare books stood next to the staircase. Black and white photographs hung on the wall to the left, showing south London through the decades.

Nostalgia, according to Connie’s father, encouraged the buying of books, and so did free biscuits: often Connie would arrive to find groups of customers reminiscing about closed-down dance halls and tea rooms and wartime rations as they ate digestives and drank cups of tea. Whether they bought any books was another matter, but their talk was a distraction for her father and that was important, especially since Connie’s mother had gone.

There were books everywhere. They spilled out from the shelves that covered two walls, were stacked on the floor, the counter, the window seat. It seemed like chaos, but her father catalogued and treasured every volume, no matter how valuable or otherwise. Every hardback or paperback – poetry, play, fiction, non-fiction, popular or literary – needed a home, and if it didn’t have one, her father would keep it safe. If they ran out of space in the shop, he would store them in the attic at Harrington Gardens. Many books had been in the shop for years – like her mother’s favourite, A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. Volume the Fourth. Inside you could read Donne and Fletcher in the smallest of print, on the thinnest of paper. Her mother had pencilled at the front Not to be sold, as she always had if it was a book she particularly prized.