Doesn’t the photo look great! A book lover’s delight, a treasure-trove of books.
It reminds me of the tiny bookshop tucked away in the corner of Padstow harbour, my favourite Cornish fishing village in the UK. The sweetest of elderly ladies ran the bookshop in the 1980’s (I was a young girl then though, so they could have only been in their 30’s!) and we often used to lose my Dad among the books, which were packed from floor to ceiling in tall, wavering columns with exciting titles facing out. My sister and I dared each other to take a book from the bottom of the pile…
I always headed for the children’s adventure books; Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series, her adventure series with Kiki the parrot (sounds more like a stripper!) and Malcolm Saville’s Lone Pine series – a long-standing favourite of mine, set in Devon, Rye, London, and Shropshire.
Taking a pile of books back to our caravan (trailer) for my holiday reads became a tradition, even an obsession, and I still recall the thrill of finding the last book in the series, or a second-hand book hidden within the rickety shelves of that wonderful bookshop. If I close my eyes and recall the memories, I can still smell the dusty aroma of aging books, still feel the excitement of discovering a hidden gem among the abundance of titles, and still see the diffused lights, dimmed by the sea of books closing in on me from above. If they had come crashing down on me I would have lay there beneath them in sheer bliss!
Padstow harbour looking towards the old bookshop
I may have been a child, but little did those elderly ladies know, as they placed my purchases in their pretty paper bags and took the money from my eager little hands, that they were serving a future thriller author, whose leap from Blyton to Stephen King, James Patterson, and Karin Slaughter would come sooner rather than later. Back then, my mind was already taking note of all those thriller and horror book covers, storing them up for inspiration for my kidnap thriller, Captor Captive.
The beautiful Padstow harbour
Do you have a favourite bookshop? What about a holiday/vacation ritual that you just have to do? I’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch, leave a comment, or follow me on Social Media!
L.J. Kane is the British author of Captor Captive, the shocking psychological suspense thriller (released in April 2017 as Snatch Girl). Captor Captive is not for the faint hearted!
Captor Captive is available on 
as an ebook and paperback.
L. J. Kane 