Chapter 1
ONE
LUCY
Lucy slid off her sunglasses, rubbing her eyes as the glare of the sun hit the narrow, cobbled street. The taxi had stopped outside her grandmother’s bookshop, and the scent of salt and seaweed drifted in from the harbour of the small fishing village. She shivered, though the heat was relentless.
The shop’s sign glimmered in curling gold letters across the whitewashed wall: Les Pages d’Espoir.
Two rows of windows looked down from the flat above, geraniums spilling vivid crimson from their boxes, petals trembling in the warm, salt breeze.
An oval attic window, like a wise owl’s eye, peered over it all.
Lucy’s hand lingered on the old, ornate brass key.
It turned smoothly, almost as if the shop had been waiting for her, and she slowly pushed the door open.
Sunlight streamed through the stained-glass panels, scattering jewel-like colours across the wooden floor.
The air smelled faintly of old paper and lavender.
She leaned against the door, taking it all in.
The shop looked unchanged. The shelves groaned under the weight of hundreds of books.
Little wooden seagulls and toy planes hovered above the children’s corner, suspended by invisible threads.
Her eyes swept the counter, the brass till, and for a heartbeat she expected Mémé to appear, smiling behind it.
Lucy stepped forward, her high heels tapping lightly on the floor as she traced her fingers over the shelves.
Her long, dark hair was uncoiling itself from the tortoiseshell clip that held it back from her lightly tanned face, but she didn’t notice.
Memories were coming back to her, pressing around her.
All those times she’d perched on that counter, scribbling stories about mermaids in her exercise books, while Mémé read beside her.
The bookshop was bursting with so many warm moments from her childhood. But now Mémé was gone. And the shop, the most precious legacy Mémé could’ve passed on to her, had become Lucy’s responsibility.
But she couldn’t accept it; a promotion waited for her back in London.
It was the next step in the career she had worked for her entire life.
Selling the shop was the practical choice, the one she had already decided before she’d even left the airport.
But still, something deep in her heart ached at the prospect of saying goodbye to Les Pages d’Espoir.
Lucy went behind the counter, the edge worn smooth over the years under Mémé’s soft hands.
She remembered a time when she’d had to stand on tiptoe to see over it.
She pressed the ‘no sale’ sign on the till, just to hear its bright ring again.
She smiled to herself as she closed the till drawer, then something caught her eye on one of the shelves under the counter.
A folded envelope was tucked beneath a stack of spare till rolls, with Lucy’s name written across it in her grandmother’s familiar looping script. Heart thudding, she slit it open and read the words aloud.
My dear, dear Lucy,
I’m writing this letter sitting behind the counter… By now, you’ll know that this bookshop is yours. I want you to carry it on…
The shop seemed even quieter now, as if it were listening. The letter spoke of a secret book club run by Mémé’s mother, Margot, that had met here at midnight during the occupation. Women had defied the Nazis’ curfew to share forbidden stories and to fight back.
Mémé wanted Lucy to piece together the fragments of the past, and write the story of Margot’s resistance book club.
And finally, the letter mentioned a book that had been wrapped in newspaper, and hidden under the counter for decades.
There are secrets tied to the book club, and it’s time you found out.
Lucy looked again and saw something in the shadows.
It looked very much like it could be the book mentioned in the letter, and her fingers trembled as she reached for it.
The old, yellowing paper crackled under her touch as she slid it towards her.
As it came into the light, she saw the name Esther, scrawled in a blank space between the newsprint.
Lucy lifted it carefully, turning it in her hands. Who was Esther? And why had Mémé kept her mother’s book club and resistance work secret for all these years?
Her phone buzzed in her bag and it took Lucy by surprise; the signal in Cordeval was usually terrible. It was probably her job. She swallowed as she thought of London, of the offer, and the life she had mapped out so precisely that it had never once allowed for detours like this.
Perhaps it was someone else, but Lucy didn’t want to think about her broken heart now. She looked down at the book again, and the name. Esther. She wondered about the secret her grandmother had kept all these years, about the wartime book club that had once met here.
The phone buzzed again, the weak signal still holding out. For a moment, Lucy closed her eyes, trying to hold everything in.
When she opened them, her gaze moved slowly around the shop. From the shelves tight with books, to the coloured light scattered across the polished floor. This place, and the village it was in, had been her past and wasn’t supposed to be her future.
And yet—
Her grasp tightened around the book.
If she sold the shop, Mémé’s story about the resistance book club would never be told. She would never find out whatever had happened to it, or whoever Esther had been.
If she stayed here too long… everything else might disappear. The life she’d worked so hard to build would disintegrate like a crumbling page from an old book.
For a moment, Lucy could almost hear Mémé’s voice, gentle and steady, whispering from behind the counter. And perhaps some other voices too, so quiet now but seemingly growing louder, of women who were strangers – but couldn’t she get to know them somehow?
She didn’t have to go back to London right away. Perhaps she could buy herself a little time; enough to uncover their stories.