Indie Bookstores 'Connected Me to the Wider World'

"One of my first jobs was in an independent bookstore in Delhi. Aside from letting me discover new books, it gave me a small but solid anchor in the tough city. I learned that you could trust an Indie seller to recommend a book that will be real, surprising, refreshing, different, their choice and suggestion uncorrupted by anything except their own unique mind. Later on, in other Indies, I discovered writers like Paul Bowles and Anna Kavan, Natsumi Soseki. There was one store in Delhi, I can't remember the name now, but it had a small carousel of books from the London publisher Peter Owen. Such precious gold! Especially living in India, pre-Internet, such bookstores were lifelines, they nourished me, connected me to the wider world. And taught me early on that novels don’t have to follow rules, that they can be strange."