Jenny Colgan

All the real blokes I know are obsessed with cars and have started doing cycling at the weekend and being really, really boring about it and banging on about their Fitbits and growing stupid beards and talking about being on Tinder. That's what all the 'real men' are like these days!

There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier; to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduct between the two worlds.

Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.

The look you get when you__e reading in your van, and your feet are up and you sit so still, and your face is alight, and I don__ know where you are; you could be anywhere, so far away, off in a part of your mind I__l never get to . . . It drives me crazy. The way you just came here, just got up, changed your entire life . . . I mean, my family__ been here for four generations. It would never have occurred to me to do what you did, just to start over and do something different. Amazing.

Christmas, as a practicing Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church.

I have a head for business and a body for sin. Unfortunately, the sin appears to be gluttony.

They were probably reading on their tablets,_ said Nina loyally. She loved her e-reader, too. __es, I know,_ said the man. __ut I couldn__ see. I couldn__ see what they were reading or ask them if it was good, or make a mental note to look for it later. It was as if suddenly, one day, all the books simply disappeared.

This is what you British do not understand about the French. You think you must work, work, work, work and open on Sundays and make mothers and fathers with families slave in supermarkets at three o'clock in the morning and make people leave their homes and their churches and their children and go shopping on Sundays.''Their shops are open on Sundays?' said Benoît in surprise.'Yes! They make people work on Sundays! And through lunchtimes! But for what? For rubbish from China? For cheap clothes sewed by poor women in Malaysia? For why? So you can go more often to KFC and get full of fried chicken? You would rather have six bars of bad chocolate than one bar of good chocolate. Why? Why are six bad things better than one good thing? I don't understand.