Page 2 of The Resistance Book Club

She leaned against the door, taking it all in. The shop looked unchanged. The shelves groaned under the weight ofhundreds of books. Little wooden seagulls and toy planes hovered above the children’s corner, suspended by invisible threads. Her eyes swept the counter, the brass till, and for a heartbeat she expected Mémé to appear, smiling behind it.

Lucy stepped forward, her high heels tapping lightly on the floor as she traced her fingers over the shelves. Her long, dark hair was uncoiling itself from the tortoiseshell clip that held it back from her lightly tanned face, but she didn’t notice. Memories were coming back to her, pressing around her. All those times she’d perched on that counter, scribbling stories about mermaids in her exercise books, while Mémé read beside her.

The bookshop was bursting with so many warm moments from her childhood. But now Mémé was gone. And the shop, the most precious legacy Mémé could’ve passed on to her, had become Lucy’s responsibility.

But she couldn’t accept it; a promotion waited for her back in London. It was the next step in the career she had worked for her entire life. Selling the shop was the practical choice, the one she had already decided before she’d even left the airport. But still, something deep in her heart ached at the prospect of saying goodbye to Les Pages d’Espoir.

Lucy went behind the counter, the edge worn smooth over the years under Mémé’s soft hands. She remembered a time when she’d had to stand on tiptoe to see over it. She pressed the ‘no sale’ sign on the till, just to hear its bright ring again. She smiled to herself as she closed the till drawer, then something caught her eye on one of the shelves under the counter.

A folded envelope was tucked beneath a stack of spare till rolls, with Lucy’s name written across it in her grandmother’s familiar looping script. Heart thudding, she slit it open and read the words aloud.

My dear, dear Lucy,

I’m writing this letter sitting behind the counter…By now, you’ll know that this bookshop is yours. I want you to carry it on…

The shop seemed even quieter now, as if it were listening. The letter spoke of a secret book club run by Mémé’s mother, Margot, that had met here at midnight during the occupation. Women had defied the Nazis’ curfew to share forbidden stories and to fight back.

Mémé wanted Lucy to piece together the fragments of the past, and write the story of Margot’s resistance book club.

And finally, the letter mentioned a book that had been wrapped in newspaper, and hidden under the counter for decades.

There are secrets tied to the book club, and it’s time you found out.

Lucy looked again and saw something in the shadows. It looked very much like it could be the book mentioned in the letter, and her fingers trembled as she reached for it. The old, yellowing paper crackled under her touch as she slid it towards her. As it came into the light, she saw the name Esther, scrawled in a blank space between the newsprint.

Lucy lifted it carefully, turning it in her hands. Who was Esther? And why had Mémé kept her mother’s book club and resistance work secret for all these years?

Her phone buzzed in her bag and it took Lucy by surprise; the signal in Cordeval was usually terrible. It was probably her job. She swallowed as she thought of London, of the offer, and the life she had mapped out so precisely that it had never once allowed for detours like this.

Perhaps it was someone else, but Lucy didn’t want to think about her broken heart now. She looked down at the book again,and the name.Esther. She wondered about the secret her grandmother had kept all these years, about the wartime book club that had once met here.

The phone buzzed again, the weak signal still holding out. For a moment, Lucy closed her eyes, trying to hold everything in.

When she opened them, her gaze moved slowly around the shop. From the shelves tight with books, to the coloured light scattered across the polished floor. This place, and the village it was in, had been her past and wasn’t supposed to be her future.

And yet?—

Her grasp tightened around the book.

If she sold the shop, Mémé’s story about the resistance book club would never be told. She would never find out whatever had happened to it, or whoever Esther had been.

If she stayed here too long…everything else might disappear. The life she’d worked so hard to build would disintegrate like a crumbling page from an old book.

For a moment, Lucy could almost hear Mémé’s voice, gentle and steady, whispering from behind the counter. And perhaps some other voices too, so quiet now but seemingly growing louder, of women who were strangers – but couldn’t she get to know them somehow?

She didn’t have to go back to London right away. Perhaps she could buy herself a little time; enough to uncover their stories.

TWO

MARGOT

Cordeval, Normandy, October 1941

The cellar beneath Margot’s bookshop was lit with candles, dotted sparingly around the room. Margot and her friends sat close together in a circle, their faces pale against the darkness. Their features trembled in the flickering light.

They were risking their lives by being here.

No one knew they were down here in this chilly cellar under a bookshop, plotting resistance and breaking the curfew imposed on them by the Germans. Above ground, there were Nazi soldiers marching through the streets of their village on the edge of the sea.