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A Merry Christmas from the shed library

Did the book inspire the shed, or did the shed suggest the book?

Earlier this year I converted our old, wooden garden shed into a library to house the overflow of books from our house, and the many books we have been storing that had belonged to my parents and my husband’s parents.

Inside the Shed Library
Simultaneously, I was working on my third novel, The Body Parts in the Library, a cosy crime story about Sallie and Jo, a couple of women who have been made redundant from their jobs in a village library and replaced with a group of volunteers. 

When a silly prank is played on one of the volunteers, Sallie and Jo are suspected of being behind it and find themselves shunned by the rest of the village.

They set out to find who was responsible for the prank and the other bizarre events that happen subsequently, to try to prove their innocence.

But after a grim discovery is made in the library, they have to become amateur detectives, to try to identify the culprit so that village life can return to normal.

At the same time, they decide to open a library in Jo’s garden shed to raise money for charity and allow the villagers to borrow books from their own extensive collections..

The Body Parts in the Library was published in September this year and is now in stock at three Leicestershire libraries as well as being for sale on Amazon as either a Kindle e-book or paperback.

After putting up our Christmas decorations this year, we used up the left over tinsel to decorate the pictures on the walls of our shed library. And, after our Christmas Day walk, we took a bottle of wine and some nibbles down to the shed library to kick off our Christmas celebrations, because all the pubs in the village were closed because of Covid 19.

As I looked round at the shelves full of books, which had finally come out of the boxes we had been storing them in for so many years, I wondered if it was a case of art imitating life, or life imitating art.

Whatever the answer, I am pleased that I have managed to finish writing The Body Parts in the Library, after many years of working on it, and that I have finally been able to unpack all the books that have been hidden away in boxes for so long.

So as New Year’s Eve approaches, I can reflect on the two good things that have come out of 2020 for me.

It has been a horrific year for the whole world. So let’s hope for a better 2021 for everyone, everywhere. 


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