Katarina Bivald

That which didn't kill them made them stranger.

Sara couldn't help but think that she had somehow missed the moment when life was meant to begin. For a long time she had simply drifted through it, reading. While everyone around her was teenaged, unhappy, and foolish, this hadn't been a problem. But then suddenly everyone had grown up around her, and she had done nothing but read.

There's always a person for every book. And a book for every person.

As long as she had books and money, nothing could be a catastrophe.

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.

For as long as she could remember, she had thought that autumn air went well with books, that the two both somehow belonged with blankets, comfortable armchairs, and big cups of coffee or tea.

We're too practical, I guess. You've got to be something of a dreamer to enjoy books

It was, in many ways, her dream bookshop. Not least because all the books had already been read.Books that had already been read were the best.

This is a small town, so everyone talks. Ironic, isn't it__o few people, so many opinions?

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.

...nowadays, everyone seemed to be dreaming of absolutely everything. Traveling and loving and having a fantastic career and a happy family, all while being thin, beautiful, popular, and in touch with their spiritual side.

She had kept well behind the safety barrier her entire life, but now she was standing there at the edge of the precipice for the very first time, fumbling blindly with the realization that there were other ways to live, at how intense and rich life could be.