The Bookshop on the Corner Read Online Free PDF

“Could you just take a look at it? Let me know? Come on, they’re interviewing us both anyway. Might as well help out your illiterate chum.”
    Nina looked at him. She knew her session with Cathy had not gone well. It was almost like she was sabotaging herself by helping Griffin. On the other hand, he needed help . . .
    With a sigh, she took the application and plunged deep into impenetrable paragraphs about multimedia, moving forward, and crowd-sourcing content. The more she read, the more depressed she felt. Was this what the world wanted now? Becauseif it was, she didn’t know if she had it. She tried to help Griffin with some of his more incomprehensible sentence structures, but she couldn’t help comparing all this stuff about paradigms and envelope-pushing and sustainability targets with her own application, which had short, neatly typed paragraphs about libraries being the center of their communities and how reading helped children fulfill their potential. This had, she could see, much grander ambitions.
    She sighed and looked at the ad again.
    The van was long, not unlike an ice-cream truck, with an old-fashioned frontage. The pictures of the interior revealed it to be completely empty, with enough space—she’d actually drawn a model of it on some paper—for plenty of high shelving down each side, plus a little corner seating area where she could have a sofa, and maybe the children’s books . . . a couple of bean bags . . . She found herself staring dreamily out of the open window into the noisy Birmingham evening.
    Outside, two men were having a loud discussion about how someone had cheated them about a car; a clutch of adolescents was screaming with laughter on their way down the road; there were four buses honking at the crossroads for some reason; and there was the endless roar of traffic from the nearby overpass. But Nina didn’t hear any of it.
    She could see it perfectly. She could. She could imagine the entire thing. Some gas, her stock—so many of the books she’d picked up were absolutely brand new, in perfect condition. And with all the libraries closing . . . was it possible she could bring something good out of something so awful?
    She glanced at the address again. Kirrinfief. She looked up ways of getting there. The fast ones weren’t cheap, and the cheap ones . . .
    She had weeks of vacation days that she’d never taken. If she didn’t get a new job, she was going to lose it all anyway, right? She might as well take advantage of some of the last free days she’d ever get paid for.
    Before she knew it, she’d finished Griffin’s grandiose application form—and booked herself a bus ticket.

Chapter Four
    N ina let her book fall into her lap, conscious that she was getting drowsy.
    It was late in the evening and she’d been on the bus all day, with only the shortest of stops to stretch her legs and wander about at superhighway service stations—not normally great places to relax. The day was nearly over but the sun was still high in the sky—it stayed light here far later than it did down in Birmingham—and it was glowing strongly through the left-hand window she was leaning against as they crossed the Forth Road Bridge. The glow off the quiet Firth was shining pink, making it feel for an instant as though the bus was flying through the white wires of the great structure.
    Nina had never been to Scotland before. In fact, as she’d booked her ticket, for less than the price of an evening in the pub, she’d realized that at the age of twenty-nine, there were lots of places she’d never been. Of course she had been to Narnia and the Little House on the Prairie, and Wonderland, but to actually smell the deep, rich, yeasty smell of the old graystreets as they’d approached Edinburgh, the ancient cobbles almost making her dismount then and there as the iron sky was reflected in the windows of the tall