Storybook Ending: A Novel - Softcover

Macdonald, Moira

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593851315 ISBN 13: 9780593851319

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A charming story about friendship, community, and the magic that happens in bookstores—when an anonymous note left in a book finds the wrong recipient.

April, a smart and lonely tech worker, worries work from home has gotten out of hand: She’s left an anonymous note in a book for Westley, the clerk at her Seattle neighborhood bookstore who has a gentle smile and looks great in flannel. But thanks to fate, Laura—a busy single mom who had given up on love—buys the book, finds the note, and thinks Westley has left it for her. A handsome man who loves books seems like just the plot twist she has been looking for.

Meanwhile, Westley—not the most perceptive—is too distracted by the movie filming at the store and the ambition it’s unlocked in him to notice either of the two women. But as April and Laura’s anonymous correspondence continues back and forth, their mundane routines are challenged, sparking a glimmer of hope. Is a happy ending in the cards for them?

A heartwarming web of mistaken identities and serendipitous encounters, Storybook Ending is a playful tribute to friendship, love stories of all kinds, and to the objects—from a forgotten slip of paper to someone’s heart—left between the pages of books we loved.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Moira Macdonald is the longtime arts critic for The Seattle Times. Her debut novel, Storybook Ending, has sold worldwide and is being translated into nineteen languages.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

April

The letter was a mistake. She was sure of it.

April often wondered if living alone gave her too much time to ponder. She had a tendency to overthink, telling herself stories for company, to fill up her otherwise unoccupied rooms. Her apartment, for example, was the source of many stories: It was a cozy one-bedroom on the third floor of a forthright-looking redbrick 1920s building, and sometimes April imagined a small family sharing it during the Depression, maybe with a sheet curtaining off a corner of the living room to give the parents some privacy. Or a woman living there alone in the 1940s, working an assembly line in a Seattle factory and waiting for her husband or fiancé to return from war. Or a Mad Men-ish single woman in the 1960s, a secretary in a bright dress who gazed at all the men who held the jobs she really wanted and wondered when her life would change. Each of them might have left their mark, in the faint scratches on the wood floors or the tiny chips in the bathroom tile or the ancient, yellowing shelf paper in the linen closet. Maybe some of them were still alive, living somewhere else, fondly remembering the years in that apartment on that quiet Seattle block with a springtime view of paper-pink cherry blossoms on the street below. Sometimes April imagined a reunion in the apartment, with people from different eras somehow magically sharing the same time and space. They'd probably all be horrified by how much she was paying in rent, and by the fact that she hadn't gotten around to changing the shelf paper. (Did anyone really change shelf paper?)

But right now, April was fixated on something entirely new, something far from those familiar, pleasantly faded walls. She had written the letter and taken it to its destination, and almost instantly regretted it.

Nobody ever seemed to write actual letters anymore, but April loved the idea of a handwritten, on-paper, non-email correspondence-handwriting, with its loops and swirls and angles, seemed to be a tiny map to someone's essence, or a portal to another time, like a Victorian novel written with a scratchy fountain pen. But she knew all too well that some letters should never be sent. Letters confessing a painful secret, perhaps; the sort better to be carried to one's grave or at least one's dotage, whatever that was. Letters that contain the written equivalent of a toddler's temper tantrum, a fury quickly dissipated but living on through angry scribbles on a piece of paper. Letters repeating gossip that may or may not be true-maybe especially if it's true. Or letters written late at night, beginning with "You don't know me, but . . ." and going on to express something that could only be described as a crush on a person one doesn't exactly know.

Unfortunately, the letter she had written was exactly that last type.

And while she hadn't actually sent it, it had nonetheless reached its destination: slipped within the pages of a book-Anthony Horowitz's Magpie Murders, to be precise-and dropped off in a pile at the used-books desk at Read the Room, the neighborhood bookstore just two blocks down from April's building, on a bright May afternoon that seemed to pulse with promise. At the store, a thirtysomething man whose name April didn't know, with a carelessly becoming beard and the kind of gentle smile that might inspire bad poetry, had the job of tending to the new arrivals of used books, sorting and checking through them. He would, April was certain, find the letter and read it. He seemed careful in his work, like he might be the sort of person who would appreciate the mystery of an anonymous correspondent. Though very, very good-looking-surely he wasn't an actor, but he looked like he could be one-he seemed quiet and bookish and maybe even a little shy. She'd seen him politely interacting with customers, and once watched him patiently looking up a book online for an elderly man who seemed highly skeptical of computers. He seemed, in short, nice.

April was ready for nice. She was, officially, lonely. Working from home had seemed so convenient at first, but now it appeared to have become something permanent without her ever agreeing to it-and, as a person who tended toward introversion, she'd adapted to it maybe too easily. The other day, she'd been out for a walk-she made herself leave the apartment once a day no matter what, even in the frequent Seattle spring rain-and found herself getting far too enthusiastic over a sweater-clad dog whose owner hustled her pet away quickly. It worried April that she seemed to be getting out of practice in talking to people, but how could she practice? She just wasn't meeting anyone. Even her neighbors in the building all seemed just like her: quiet and solitary, rarely venturing out. April heard their music and footsteps and mysterious thumps, but rarely saw them-imagining their stories rather than knowing them.

She could, of course, have just walked right up to the bookstore man and said hello, like a regular person, but she'd hatched the idea of the letter late one night after watching a rom-com double feature, not long after she'd reread 84, Charing Cross Road. Things worked out so nicely in the movies, and the letters in the book (between a bookshop employee, April noted, and a woman who loved to read) were so charming, and somehow in the middle of the night it all seemed like a good idea. Sometimes, April had reasoned, sitting at her desk in the darkness, you just have to throw something out into the world and see what happens. That morning, she'd quickly dropped off the letter in the book without giving herself time to rethink it. And now, as the late afternoon settled into a quiet, soft-sweater grayness, it wasn't easy to keep her mind on her work.

A buzz from her apartment's intercom interrupted April's thoughts, startling her. She was, as usual, not expecting anyone; her brother, Ben, was the only person in her life with a habit of showing up unannounced, and this afternoon she knew he was at an audition for a musical, despite not being able to sing. She crossed the room and pressed the button.

"Hello?"

"I have a pizza delivery for . . . Jackson?"

"Sorry," April said, "that's next door. Number 305." This wasn't the first time the pizza man had gotten it wrong. Mr. Jackson, a retired schoolteacher with whom April had chatted briefly a couple of times in the lobby or the hallway, ordered pizza every Thursday. She was uncomfortably aware of knowing this; maybe she had a little too much time to study her neighbors' habits.

"Thanks."

From her window, April watched the pizza man return to his car, a tiny two-door with an enormous plastic pizza slice on top. Maybe someone was waiting for him at the end of his shift-someone who had thought to preheat the oven for the pizza he would bring home, someone interested in hearing about his day and his adventures in pizza-delivering. Someone who hadn't had to leave a note in a book to meet someone. The little car drove away.

Anyway. The letter was done. And then what would happen, if the bookstore man did read it? Probably nothing, April thought, back at her desk and back to overthinking. Maybe grown-up women-April was thirty-three, an age that felt to her neither old nor young-working grown-up tech jobs from home shouldn't be imagining themselves as the not-blond heroine of a Nora Ephron movie. (April's hair was a very non-rom-com medium brown, though she liked to think she had a better haircut than Meg Ryan had in You've Got Mail.) Maybe boredom and solitude had led her to take a step too far. Maybe she really wasn't much of a writer. It wasn't even truly a letter, just a paragraph really, and maybe it had needed another draft-it was too short, not funny enough. April believed in rewriting, in trying to make things better. In the empty stretch of her evening, she feared...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593851315
• ISBN 13: 9780593851319
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Edel Music & Entertainment GmbH; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; Deutschland