His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

She was the breeze on a summer's day, the first drops of rain when the earth was parched, light from the evening star.

I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.

Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.

She was the sort of person for whom fear was the natural response to that beyond explanation.