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literal bunch without any predilection for flourishes or big words). But now it’s named after a real joker. I’m glad. It gives the town a certain dignity to have had one.
    With kind regards,
    Amy Harris

Asphalt and Concrete
    READING BOOKS ISN’T a bad way to live your life, but lately Sara had begun to wonder what kind of life it was, exactly. She had first been struck by this thought when she found out that Josephssons would be closing. It was as though ten years of her life had disappeared along with the bookshop; as though everything she had ever been had only existed on the greyish-white bookshelves of that dusty shop, among the people who bought four-for-three paperbacks in the summer, and anything-at-all-that-was-shiny-and-wrapped-up at Christmas.
    Of course, she could probably get another job in a different bookshop, but there and then, during those endless summer days in the suburban shopping centre, with the countdown to closure relentlessly ticking, she had asked herself whether this life was really enough. And that had scared her, because what else was there other than books and work?
    There really wasn’t much else, except for Amy and her small town in Iowa, one which seemed to have come straight out of a Fannie Flagg or Annie Proulx novel. Sara had bought a book from Amy through an online second-hand bookshop, where private individuals could also sell books. When Amy had declined to take any payment for her book, Sara had plucked up the courage to send a book back in thanks, and things had continued from there. Amy wrote wonderful letters about books and about the people in her little town, and that summer, they were all Sara had to cling on to. The only lifeline in an existence which had otherwise started to seem overwhelmingly pointless.
    So when Sara reached Broken Wheel, she naturally turned to books to help her. It was what she had always done.
    That morning, Sara took
Bridget Jones
out onto the porch, together with her third cup of almost undrinkable instant coffee. She moved quickly down the hallway, keeping her eyes fixed on the front door. She was trying to avoid having to look at the little altar. She wished someone would at least take the flags away, but didn’t think it was her place to do so.
    It felt better outside. The rocking chairs were comfortable and the overgrown garden looked more charming than neglected. When she rocked back and forth, the chair creaked pleasingly beneath her.
    As the sun inched slowly up above the treetops, she tried to imagine that everything was as it should be, as it should have been.
    Maybe Amy wasn’t dead? Maybe she was just busy with her flowers in the kitchen? Maybe she was upstairs somewhere, book in hand? It might have been true.
    Sara sighed. It was like trying to change an unhappy ending in a book. However much you tried to convince yourself that things could end differently if only you could get rid of the sadistic bungler of an author, it was all still there in the back of your mind. Rhett Butler had dumped Scarlett just when she had started to deserve him. Against all sense, against his own personality, the nature of love and his word, against all rhyme and reason. Not even Charlotte Brontë’s awful father had been able to prevent M. Paul from dying in
Villette
, however much Charlotte had tried to fool him by writing such an apparently ambiguous ending.
    Incomprehensible.
    That was just how things were. You simply had to try not to think about it. Margaret Mitchell was stupid and Charlotte Brontë was determined and Amy Harris was dead.
    She picked
Bridget Jones
up from her lap and forced herself to keep reading. There was something so comforting in the fact that the book was just the same as it had been in Sweden. Bridget failed to keep her new year’s resolutions in exactly the same way as she had before, Mr Darcy wore the same mad, festive sweater. By the time Daniel Cleaver finally appeared on the scene, Sara had