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I stopped and, although our sibling bond had grown pretty brittle of late, Sophie stopped too.

“ ‘Books’?” I stared at the sign. “They called it ‘Books’? Wow…the imagination…”

“I said there was a bookshop.” Sophie shrugged. “I didn’t say it had a great name.”

“You never said anything about a bookshop. Ever!”

“Did so. You just don’t listen.”

“It looks like the place books go to die.” I squinted across the street. Behind narrow windows in arched, green-painted frames, the volumes on display leaned in sagging piles. The general beige spoke of printing in an era when color was not an option or came from a palette with three choices. Too long a time in the sun might also have contributed to the bleaching of what looked to be an unenticing heap.

“Books died ages ago.” Sophie waggled her phone at me. “Nobody reads anymore.” She gave me a push toward the road and the shop on the far side. “Except nerds like you.” And with that she was off, leaving me unsure whether she was serious or not.

I watched her negotiate the traffic on the high street—too much for a small town like Werton, almost all of it just passing through on the way to the city. She’d be heading to the Red Cross shop on the corner. Their secondhand clothes were cheap enough, and local kids hung out there sometimes on weekends.

When she left my line of sight, I crossed over to the bookshop. The building itself was old. Wright Street, our history teacher had told us—though I’m probably the only one who paid her any attention—used to be Werton’s main street. It’s where the Roman road ran. The high street got promoted to its current station after Werton’s own version of the Great Fire of London and the subsequent redesign a couple of centuries back. Most of the bookshop’s neighbors were newer, though still old and shabby looking. The bookshop, or whatever it was back then, must have been one of those curious islands you get in areas of devastation, whatever the cause, be it nuclear bomb, tidal wave, or conflagration—one of those little patches here and there that somehow escape with hardly a scratch to show for it and stand there shell-shocked, like the first man to run up the Normandy beaches on D-Day, headlong into the withering bullet storm, and somehow make it, when all his comrades nose-dived into the sand.

I hesitated at the door, which, with its flaking paint revealing a many-layered archaeology, looked more like my grandmother’s front door than that of a high-street shop. That’s Nanna Robbins, the one who definitely didn’t want us, not the other grandma, who I don’t remember meeting and who was too frail to be looking after her son’s children.

A deep breath for no particular reason, and I pushed through, setting a small bell on a spiral spring chiming.

Instead of an open shop, I found myself looking at a booklined corridor, shelves stretching to the ceiling well beyond reach. At first it seemed as if the passageway ended after just five yards, a wall of books facing me, but a brief study revealed a right-hand turn disguised by the visual complexity of the scene.

The books themselves were of all shapes and sizes, seemingly from every era, and without apparent order. I felt momentarily daunted, as if this might be some eccentric’s home rather than a place of commerce, and me the intruder, uninvited. The smell drew me in. Old books. A mix of neglect and love, a promise of secrets to be told and doors to other worlds waiting to open. One glance back at the street, even now being sealed away by the lever arm of the door, and I forged ahead.

The right turn led to a small “room” formed by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Two passages carried on, one straight ahead and the other to the left, and in the enclosed space, backed against one of the book walls, a battered counter, behind which a man sat in a rather fine chair, reading. He didn’t look up.

Something clicked into place. Almost loud enough for other people to hear. I looked at the man, at the book cave around him, his kingdom. And I knew from one moment to the next what I wanted to do, what I was for. I had never until that moment seen a future into which I fitted. I don’t say this to be dramatic, but simply because it was true. The world was full of people with plans, or ambitions—which are just a vaguer sort of plan—or goals, or perhaps only hopes. But most of them saw a world with a place for them in it. The only question was whether they’d manage to reach it, to get it, to make it happen.

Not me. Where others might see themselves as a peg of a particular cross section, looking for the correctly shaped hole in that kiddies’ game, I aways felt more of a fracture spreading through the years, breaking what it touched. I’d hoped it was something I’d grow out of. Some edgy emo shit that I could leave behind with my teens. And suddenly, the day had arrived. I saw the man, the shop, and I wanted to be him, in his chair, in his shop, enthroned in a palace of stories.

“Hello…” I felt I should say something.

The man’s eyes rose over the top of his paperback, an object that appeared to have lived life hard and for much longer than its owner. Dark brown eyes in a dark brown face, their inspection managing to feel piercing yet casual, mildly annoyed yet not unfriendly. “Hello.”

“You called it ‘Books’ then—” I managed to snap my mouth shut, reining in my runaway tongue. I hadn’t been intending to say that. I hadn’t been intending to say anything at all. “Sorry, I—” I gestured down the opposite passage. “I should…”

“It’s my name,” the man said. He looked to be in his twenties, considerably younger than both his clothes and his expression suggested. “Xavier Books.” He put down his read and indicated himself, tweed waistcoat and all, with a spread hand. “ ‘Books’s Books’ just felt a bit much. So I settled on ‘Books.’ It’s to the point.”

“You’re…” I wanted to say that Mr. Books was suitably named but managed to save both myself and the shopkeeper from following yet another eye-wateringly obvious path. “I’ll just go…” I waved again down the passage opposite. “Is there any…Where do you keep the sci-fi stuff?”

“You have to hunt it out. It’s part of the fun. You never know what you’ll find.”

“But you do have some?”

“We do indeed, young man.”

I wasn’t sure whether to feel insulted at being called “young” by someone not much more than ten years my senior or pleased at being called a “man.” I settled for asking another question. “Moorcock?”

Xavier Books raised an eyebrow at that, and after a missed beat, nodded. “Old-school fantasy. Michael Moorcock was already writing books before your father was born.”

I shrugged. “I like him. And those covers from the seventies are wild.”

“I remember some Eternal Champion novels at the back, and I’ve seen some Elrics and The Knight of the Swords high up somewhere around the windows.” Xavier waved his hand with sufficient vagueness to rule in about half the shop.

I unzipped my coat and headed toward the back. It had been a chilly almost-spring day outside. The shop had more of a cozy autumnal feel to it, despite the fact that the leaves were mostly still firmly bound into the relevant volumes.

The place was exactly the book warren that the entrance promised, a maze of the sort offered to bored children on the kids’ menus at burger joints. Simple when seen in its entirety, less so to the rat running its corridors. I turned each corner with the apprehension of bumping into another browser, or possibly a canoodling couple taking advantage of the library-like isolation, or—as I got further into the unexpectedly large space—a monster of some kind, with a zombie from the previous night’s rerun of The Walking Dead being front and center in my imaginings.