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.