Cozy Fiction

The Bookshop Beside the Bakery

by Odette Ramas

Silid Aklatan shares a wall with Panaderia Luna, and the wall takes the bakery's side: nineteen years of 4 a.m. ovens have proofed every book in the shop, and customers swear the paperbacks smell like mornings. Through the ledge in the party wall runs the only economy that matters — bread going east, books going west, sea stories priced in ensaymada by a baker who has never seen the ocean. Odette Ramas's warmest book yet: two shops, one cat with dual citizenship, and a friendship conducted entirely in trade.