The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (19 page)

For Sara, the improvised party was followed by days of firm determination.

She was convinced that the inhabitants of Broken Wheel would buy books. They
would
do it, and not all of them would need to be tricked into it, regardless of what Tom had said. Though perhaps she would have to rethink the way she displayed the books.

She stared at the bookshelves in front of her. As things stood, the books were divided into three categories: thrillers, fiction and non-fiction. They were satisfactory categories as far as she was concerned, but maybe they weren't enough to entice the uninitiated into reading.

She had been to the hardware store to buy some thick, bright white card. It was now spread out in a fan shape in front of her. Fifteen sheets. She doubted she would need that many signs, but she might need a sheet or two to practise on. Next to them was a fat black marker pen, waiting for inspiration to strike.

What did people want to read about?

Classics, maybe? She shook her head. Even she didn't buy books from the Classics shelves, despite the fact that she loved all the old British and American stalwarts.

Think, Sara, think. What would convince someone to buy a book? What convinced people to watch films? How hard could it be?

She laughed, picked up the pen and wrote, in big, clear letters: ‘SEX, VIOLENCE AND WEAPONS', and pinned the piece of card up above the thrillers.

After that, it was much easier. The book of photographs depicting natural Iowa was the lone volume on the IOWA shelf. She thought about making one for Sweden too, but the only Swedish authors she had were Jens Lapidus and Stieg Larsson, both of whom clearly belonged among the sex, violence and weapons.

It was actually quite disheartening. Broken Wheel's only image of Sweden comprised sadomasochistic conspiracies and organised crime, with a touch of Serbian mafia thrown in to confuse things.

Amy's Lonely Planet guide to Stockholm was there too. Sara found it surprisingly moving, but also unfamiliar, as though Sara was seeing her capital through Amy's eyes. The historic buildings, the sun glittering on the water, the orderliness the entire guide promised; it was all a far cry from Sara and Broken Wheel.

She wondered whether Amy would have liked to see Sweden before she died, but she couldn't really imagine her or any of the others from Broken Wheel so far from their home town. They belonged here, as certain and constant as the buildings and roads. In the end, she decided against a Sweden shelf. She didn't really want to be reminded of home.

SMALL-TOWN LIFE felt like a given, when she thought about it. People wanted to read about themselves. The only problem was that the category involved a lot of sex, violence and weaponry too, but no categorisation system would be perfect.

She paused at Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Of Mice and Men
. Clearly small-town life, but also with such loathsome endings that she wondered whether it was morally defensible to sell them. Eventually, she put them out anyway, but used one of the pieces of cardboard to cut out a smaller sign which she stuck up next to them. ‘Warning: unhappy ending!' she wrote.

If more bookshop owners had taken the responsibility to hang warning signs, her life would have been much easier. Cigarette packets came with warnings, so why not tragic books? There was wording on bottles of beer warning you not to drink and drive, but not a single word about the consequences of reading books without tissues to hand.

There were, of course, some fantastic unhappy endings. Sometimes, you just needed an excuse to let the tears flow freely. On Sara's list of books which were irresistible despite being sad were: all of Erich Maria Remarque's books, Lauren Oliver's
Before I Fell
(a kind of depressed version of
Groundhog Day
), Louis de Bernières'
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
(despite what others said, Sara was adamant it was an unhappy book; the ending was a real disappointment – why would Captain Corelli suddenly turn into an idiot?). Jodi Picoult – Sara had shed floods of tears over
My Sister's Keeper.
Maybe Nicholas Sparks belonged there too, mainly because if you ever felt like crying a little about love, he always delivered.

Next, she placed Fannie Flagg's
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe
under SMALL-TOWN LIFE, a book which also contained its fair share of unhappiness. People often thought that feel-good novels were happy, banal stories, but a real feel-good tale wasn't worth the name unless it involved a couple of murders, accidents, catastrophes or deaths. In the case of
Fried Green Tomatoes
, there were illnesses and deaths (at least two of them tragic), murder and cannibalism. The point was that it didn't end unhappily. They were books you could put down with a smile on your face, books which made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger and more beautiful when you looked up from them. Sara wondered whether she should make signs saying ‘Happy ending guaranteed!', but maybe that would be revealing too much.

For Christmas, she would buy in copies of Fannie Flagg's less ambitious
A Redbird Christmas
, possibly the ultimate Christmas present. A story so charming that it could even be given away and enjoyed at midsummer. She resolutely pushed away the thought that she wouldn't be here by Christmas.

The last category was for those who really didn't read. She called it ‘SHORT BUT SWEET' and placed all the books she could find under two hundred pages in length beneath it, as well as all of Hemingway. According to a popular and diehard legend, he had once made a wager that he could write a story in under ten words.

He won the bet:
For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

Before long, her work organising Oak Tree Bookstore seemed to be constantly interrupted by customers from Hope who had somehow found their way to the shop. They were easy to spot. Firstly, they always drove cars, newish models, rather than the pickups and vans Sara had grown used to. Secondly, they always stopped at the red light. They started off looking surprised that a town like Broken Wheel had a traffic light, then irritated that it was red, then even more annoyed when they realised it was
always
red. When they finally arrived at the bookshop, they were ready to regain their lost composure.

On that particular morning, she was interrupted by a customer who looked around in confusion the moment he stepped into the shop, as though he still couldn't believe that Broken Wheel had a bookshop – this despite the fact that he had seen the shop window with his very own eyes and was now standing in the middle of the shop itself.

He nodded when he saw the yellow counter and the armchairs. If Broken Wheel was going to have a bookshop, he seemed to be thinking, at least it came as no surprise to find that it wasn't a normal one. He smiled when he saw the shop was empty and Sara could read his mind: ‘They might well have a bookshop, but do they have anyone who can read?'

She wasn't amused.

Still, she should have been grateful. Most of the customers from Hope actually bought books. She had sold her first few a couple of days earlier and for once had been able to use the cash register she counted up so carefully every morning and evening. Exactly fifty dollars in small change.

At the same time, there was no point pretending she wasn't bothered by the glances the Hope residents gave to one another when they saw that the shop was empty; as though they wanted to say that it was one thing opening a bookshop in Broken Wheel but something entirely different to keep it afloat.

This particular customer quickly left the bookshop with a Michael Connelly in hand, straight from the SEX, VIOLENCE AND WEAPONS shelf.

The Hope customers weren't Sara's only problem, though. A stubborn voice had taken up residence in her head and was refusing to leave her in peace. The voice constantly asked what she thought Tom was doing that very moment, or when she thought Tom might stop by the bookshop next, and wasn't it time to look out of the window to see whether … a certain someone was passing by?

She had no intention of giving in to it.

Instead, she carefully cut a sign from her white cardboard and wrote ‘GAY EROTICA' on it, in the same big, clear letters as the other signs. She hung it above a special shelf and started filling it with books.

All the while not thinking of Tom.

The next day, she was interrupted by Jen, who opened the door and marched determinedly over to her. She was wearing a light pink sweater and an even lighter, almost white skirt. The overall impression was one of pale neatness, in marked contrast to her dogged expression.

‘Can I help you with anything?' Sara asked.

‘Men!' said Jen. She fixed her eyes on Sara. ‘Have you heard anything from Tom?'

‘From Tom?'

‘Because I told him to ask you out to dinner.'

‘Oh God,' said Sara.

Jen nodded. ‘Exactly. You can't trust them. Maybe you should talk to him yourself. Sometimes they need a push.'

Jen stayed where she was, as though she expected Sara to say something.

‘I can't ask him out,' she protested.

‘Why not?'

‘Honestly, I think he thinks I'm …'

‘Yeah? Pretty? Mysterious? Interesting?' Jen said hopefully.

‘Strange.'

If she had been on the hunt for books for herself, Sara would have appreciated a shelf clearly marked ‘Chick lit to curl up with', preferably with a star confirming its quality was guaranteed. There was nothing worse than bad chick lit.

The good included: all of Helen Fielding (the
Bridget Joneses
plus
Cause Celeb
) aside from
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination.
Elizabeth Young (the author behind
Wedding Date.
Gigolos always cheered romance up). Marian Keyes. Jane Austen.

Bad chick lit included: most of the titles which had appeared in the wake of
Bridget Jones
, seemingly in the belief that all you needed was a heroine who worried about her weight and had a gay best friend. They never seemed to realise that you needed a heroine with a voice of her own; a funny voice, self-mocking, but with a whole load of inner ballsiness too. And a proper ending. The only problem with a chick-lit shelf was that, so far, George was the only one who would have been interested in the books on it, so it felt like a misleading name.

What she really wanted was all those books you could sit back and read like a magazine, with a glass of wine or a Coca-Cola with ice and lemon on a Friday evening; or with a bowl of crisps on a lazy Sunday. The book equivalent of a Meg Ryan film. Enjoyable, easy-going stories with happy endings so certain that you didn't even need to think about them. Books where the heroine was always funny and the hero always handsome, or the opposite if the book had been written by a man, doubtless made into a film with John Cusack in the lead role.

Eventually, she simply wrote ‘FOR FRIDAY NIGHTS AND LAZY SUNDAYS'.

After hesitating for a moment, she also placed Terry Pratchett there, with a smaller card beneath on which she wrote: ‘Reliable author guaranteed!'

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.

Sara's list of unreliable authors included: John Grisham. How someone could write books like
A Time to Kill
and
The Rainmaker
and then come out with completely flat, idiotic stories the rest of the time was a mystery. Maybe he simply pushed out all those other books just so the publisher would pay him his millions, but if that was the case then Sara wouldn't have hesitated to try to raise enough cash so that he could relax and take it easy, in exchange for only writing good books.

Reliable authors: Dick Francis, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer. Strictly speaking, Dan Brown also belonged here, she thought. He was so reliable that you got the exact same story every time. A kind, older mentor! Surely he won't turn out to be the villain?

Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, was reliability in a class of its own. It wasn't enough that he was producing books at a tremendous pace, he also took on an admirable amount of responsibility when he created new characters. He always alternated fairly between wizards, witches, Death and the rest, so all his readers got books about their favourites.

When he revealed that he was suffering from Alzheimer's, he comforted his readers by assuring them that he would have time for a few more books. His readers were loyal to him, too. When he donated a million pounds to Alzheimer's research, his fans started an online campaign called ‘Match it for Pratchett', to raise an additional million. Sara thought that said a great deal both about humanity and books.

It was just as she was putting Pratchett's books on the shelf, organised chronologically by publication date, that she realised someone was watching her. The bookshop was empty but when she looked up, she saw John standing outside.

They simply stood there for a moment, Sara clutching four paperbacks and John with an expressionless, empty gaze which made her feel strangely nervous.

She smiled uncertainly at him, but it didn't seem as though he had even seen her. His eyes panned over the shop and the books, but it wasn't clear whether he was seeing any of it. He didn't seem disapproving, exactly, but there was something in his reserved posture and in the fact that he hadn't bothered to come in before which made her feel uneasy. She wanted to do something for him but she didn't know what. She wanted to ask him whether he thought Amy would have been against the bookshop, but didn't dare.

Then, a customer from Hope came in and John shuddered as though he had suddenly realised he was standing there. Sara turned reluctantly to the customer. The man looked at the sign she had just hung, and then back to her, and she met his eyes, challenging him to say something about it.