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The All Night Bookshop<\/em> was inspired by our first visit to the USA in 1992. We spent the best part of a month driving round California, starting and finishing in San Francisco. One of our first ports of call was the legendary City Lights Bookstore, co-founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti<\/a> (who is, amazingly, still alive). The bookstore stayed open until midnight, an unimaginable concept in the UK, and still an unusual one (unless a Harry Potter novel is being published).<\/p>\n I remember which notebook I jotted down the idea in. It has a black rubber cover and is somewhere in the loft. Sue bought it for me when she visited the original Getty museum in LA. You weren\u2019t allowed to park and the place was hard to reach, so I dropped her off for a couple of hours and went walking on Malibu beach. The notebook was a thank-you. The title I wrote, reflecting the story\u2019s US origins, was In the All Night Bookstore<\/em>, and that\u2019s how it appeared, eight years later, when Geoff Nicholson and Martin Bax accepted it for Ambit<\/em><\/a>, in what turned out to be the last of my long run of stories for that magazine.<\/p>\n A year later, when new publisher Five Leaves<\/em> was putting together a collection of my YA ghost stories, Ross Bradshaw insisted that I include ITANB, even though a) it wasn\u2019t exactly a ghost story and b) it wasn\u2019t a YA story. I said fine. That collection sold out over a decade ago. I did consider including the piece in my collected stories, which came out in 2016. However, it was a pre-internet story and I figured it had dated badly. Happily, I was wrong. Updating the story for the internet age was easy.<\/p>\n Last year, Di Slaney asked me to write a story for a Candlestick Press short story pamphlet. You\u2019ll have come across their Ten Poems about<\/em> series, marketed as instead of a card<\/em>, thought up by our good friend, the press\u2019s founder, Jenny Swann, many years ago. Candlestick\u2019s short story (and nature writing) pamphlets are a more recent innovation. I follow in the steps of Sean O\u2019Brien. The prose is bookended by poems. I was delighted to get to choose one by Jim Burns, a Northern poetry legend (and fellow Ambit regular, a Beat enthusiast who, in his eighties, runs this<\/em> review site) for the front. And at the back I\u2019m proud to have a poem about Silver Moon Bookshop by Jackie Kay, Scotland\u2019s makar<\/em>, who has been a friend for twenty-odd years.<\/p>\n The story is narrated by a young student who wanders into a strange bookshop with a mysterious owner, falls in love with the assistant and starts working there. It isn\u2019t quite the same as the one published last century. To acknowledge this, I\u2019ve anglicised the title. The piece has expanded a little, too, excellently edited by Katherine Towers, with an atmospheric cover by Steven Hubbard. The All Night Bookshop<\/em> has a semi-mythic feel that\u2019s unlike anything else I\u2019ve written, so it\u2019s appropriate that it should be published as a stand-alone story.<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve read it before, you might consider buying this new, final version. It\u2019s only a fiver and, once you\u2019ve read it, you can always give it away instead of a card<\/em>. Even better, why not come along to the launch<\/em><\/a> which, appropriately enough, takes place on National Bookshop Day, on October 6th, and, even more appropriately, is at Five Leaves Bookshop<\/a> (independent bookshop of the year!), at the heart of Nottingham city centre, where I always imagined the story to be set. Ross will be opening late for the occasion, at 8.30pm. Alright, not quite all night but after his usual bedtime. There\u2019ll also be a rare opportunity to see Jim Burns<\/a> read, which I\u2019m looking forward to. But if you can\u2019t make it, you can order the book here<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n There aren’t all that many songs about bookshops, but there is a lovely one by Nottingham’s Gallery 47 (Jack Peachey) who I recommend you check out.*<\/p>\n