The Lost Bookshop

by Evie Woods

The human heart does not weigh these cold facts. It sees hope in the impossible, love where perhaps there is only desire. It acts without rhyme or reason.

It was exactly how I felt: a fully formed woman, but the little girl inside was still there.

Were we all preconditioned to love certain things? A moment in childhood, lost to memory but indelibly marked on our souls? To me, the promise of finding what I did not know I was looking for was the lure of the game.

Yet it struck me that being a woman was akin to a performance, with its cues and lines that had to be learned. I knew how I was supposed to act and what I was supposed to say, I just wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to.

If it had been up to me, he would have been a better father. It was never up to me. It was up to him.

I wished we were still in Paris, where being ordinary was frowned upon and breaking the rules was a rite of passage.

The female sex was a curio for them; something to be studied but not understood. A nuisance to be controlled.

But when you’ve had a taste of magic, it’s hard to be satisfied with the ordinary again.

It’s the circle of hell in this life – blaming children for being who they are, because we were blamed and our parents before us. If you’re not harming anyone, why try to change who you are?’

It’s only in something’s absence that you realise how much space it takes up.

‘The thing about books,’ she said, ‘is that they help you to imagine a life bigger and better than you could ever dream of.’