Nina’s journey moves forward in stops and starts, first while she’s figuring out how to chase her dream and discovering pieces already completed in her life that she’d done almost unconsciously.

Her original plan was to bring the truck to Birmingham and set up shop there, but that doesn’t prove as easy as she thought it would be – plus all the people in the town where the truck had been listed for sale grew very excited about the idea of a bookshop on wheels, since they hadn’t had a library or a bookshop in years. Nina is forced into that “Now what?” position by the loss of her job, and with her severance and a few bursts of desperation and desire, she ends up the owner of a used bread truck in a small town in Scotland that she wants to turn into a mobile bookshop. I generally like books about people who start over, who begin a life again this time focused on making choices and conscious decisions about what they want instead of defaulting to what’s expected, what’s easiest, or what’s next on a checklist whose usefulness they haven’t questioned. When the library’s HR offers them a career and personal discovery session, Nina has to take a look at what she’s dreamed of doing, and what she could or would like to do now that her autopilot life has been destroyed. The remaining branch has limited jobs and Nina and her co-workers have to compete with one another for very slim pickings that she’s not entirely sure she wants anyway. Remaining funds for libraries require that her branch and several others close in favor of a centrally located library with an emphasis on technology and internet connectivity. Summary time! Nina is an English librarian (the book is set in Birmingham and a very small village in Scotland) who is good at readers advisory but surrounded by a changing library world that’s contracting. It wasn’t a perfect romance – the romance is very understated – but a book about books, about finding yourself and others books to be friends with, and about finding the life you want had a deeply beneficial medicinal value for me, and I was tremendously comforted by it. I read this book while I was half out of my mind with a high-fever flu, and it was exactly what I needed.

The bookshop on the corner characters