A Thousand Lives

With an astounding sense of timing, Annabel Townsend signed a lease on a new bookstore venture, one week before the Covid-19 pandemic was declared. Not to be deterred by a mere global crisis, she decided that lockdowns were the perfect opportunity to get people reading. With the world growing ever more strange around it, the fledgling business began providing an essential form of escapism and solace in troubled times-books. Faced with nightmare landladies, temperature extremes, conspiracy theorists, and delivering books via bicycle, it soon became clear that Covid-19 was the least challenging part of operating the business.

Framed by different works of fiction, these essays tell the stories of the bookstore, of Saskatchewan, and of the community of customers, writers, booksellers, and booklovers that surrounded the business during the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 crisis. A Thousand Lives is part-memoir, part-comedy and all true-because truth is always stranger than fiction. 

Conversations with Friends 

The Book Mess 

Pedagogy of the Impressed 

Inspiration from the Da Vinci Code 

Coffee Geographies 

Wayfinding in Flatland 

A Tale of Two Cities 

Landlords and Other Parasites 

L Space and the Garage Problem 

Quarantine Reads 

No 

The Floor Tiles of Dorian Gray 

Youth 

Pennies and Wolf Women 

Renting from the Mafia Boss 

Not Colonising the Moon 

Intoxicating Spaces 

Annabel and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day 

Still Air That Bites 

The Plastic Box That Broke Us 

Colourful Hipster-Doofuses 

Popes, Poets and Portals 

Love in a Time of Corona 

Driving Towards a Healthy Society 

On Cowboys and Ghosts 

The Familiar Strange 

Books Cited 

About the Author