If somebody had told me at the beginning of 2020 that over the next fourteen months I’d write three books in three lockdowns, I wouldn’t have believed them. And yet, here we are. A Bookshop Christmas was written during UK Lockdown 3.0 (Tokyo Drift) and I finished the third draft on day 362 of shielding, four days before I got my first vaccine. It has been quite the year but spending part of it in an imaginary bookshop set in a York where Coronavirus never existed has been a soothing balm.
My thanks to my agents Julie Fergusson and Lina Langlee (neither of whom are anything like Philomena Bloom), to Lydia Mason and Thorne Ryan for helping me wrangle my story into shape, to Josephine Gibbons for the copy edits, to Lisa Brewster for another gorgeous cover and everyone else at Aria/Head of Zeus for everything they do to make our books the best they can be.
A Jane Austen Christmas by Maria Grace was an invaluable and amusing guide to Regency festivities – particularly when it came to food and recipes, some of which honestly sounded disgusting!
Thank you to Natalie Sellers for her in-depth knowledge of Porsches and their inability to drive in snow, to Sarah Bennett for her regular and invaluable synopsis assistance and to my husband for reading an early draft and helping me redevelop Xander’s story arc.
Another lockdown book meant another book without seeing my cheerleaders – Nat, Max, Sarah, Rachael, Rachel and Kate. Thank God for WhatsApp, eh?
Thank you to all the reviewers, bloggers and readers who have helped me make this crazy storytelling my job. I can’t believe we’ve done this six times already!
And finally, I can’t write acknowledgements to a book about a bookshop without thanking all the booksellers out there who put our books in the hands of the readers they know will love them and who have had such a challenging time after a year of shop closures, lockdowns and furloughs.