The Bookshop

Hay-on-Wye is a small town on the border between Wales and England in which there are more bookshops than bakeries, butchers and banks put together. Rosa Huaman, a geology student from Cusco who was spending a year at a university in Cardiff, had come for the day with a list of books she needed and a strict budget of twenty pounds. By three o'clock she had spent eleven, and she had visited every shop in town except one.

The last shop, hidden at the end of a narrow lane, was the kind of place in which you could lose a whole afternoon without noticing. Books covered every wall, every table and most of the stairs. Behind the counter sat an elderly man wearing a green cardigan, who glanced at the rock hammer sticking out of her bag and said, "Geology's upstairs, second room on the left," before Rosa had even opened her mouth.

Upstairs, on a shelf full of old travel books, she found a novel she hadn't been looking for: a thin hardback called The Hill of Silver, published in London in 1961. She opened it, mostly out of curiosity, and froze. On the first page, written in faded blue ink, were the words: "For Rosa, without whom I would never have reached the top. Cusco, 1969. D."

She carried it downstairs with her heart beating fast. The bookseller, whose name was Mr. Pugh, took the book, read the inscription and then looked at her for a long moment. "Rosa," he said. "And from Peru, I'd guess, by your accent. Well, well." He told her that he could say where almost every book in the shop had come from. It was, he admitted, the only thing he was really good at.

This one, he explained, was part of a collection he had bought the previous spring from a woman in Brecon, whose uncle had died at the age of ninety. The uncle, a geologist called David Price, had spent several years working in the Andes as a young man. "He wrote a few books himself, I believe," said Mr. Pugh. "Rather dull ones, about rocks. This isn't one of them. This is a novel, and a good one."

Rosa sat down on a pile of encyclopedias. The coincidence was too strange to ignore. Her grandmother, who was also called Rosa, had grown up in Cusco and had worked in the late sixties as an interpreter for a group of foreign scientists, about whom she still told stories. Rosa took out her phone and, with Mr. Pugh's permission, photographed the inscription and sent it to her mother, asking her to show it to her grandmother.

The reply came forty minutes later, during which Mr. Pugh made her two cups of tea and told her the history of almost every shelf in the shop. It was a voice message from her grandmother, who was laughing so hard that she could barely speak. Yes, she said, she had known a young Welsh geologist called David. She had guided him up a mountain near Cusco that he wanted to study, and on which he had nearly given up because of the altitude.

"He was very polite and very bad at Spanish," her grandmother went on. "We used to practice with a novel he had brought from home, which he read to me in English and I translated, badly, into Spanish. When he went back to Wales, he wrote to say he was sending me a copy of my own as a present. It never arrived. The next year I met your grandfather, and I stopped waiting for the post."

Rosa explained everything to Mr. Pugh, who listened with his eyes closed. When she had finished, he was silent for a while. Then he wrapped the book in brown paper, tied it with string and handed it to her. She reached for her purse, in which there were exactly nine pounds left, but he shook his head. "Books sold in this shop go to the people they belong to," he said. "This one has been on its way to Cusco for more than fifty years. I'd hate to be the man who delayed it any longer."

Rosa sent the book to her grandmother the following morning from Cardiff, with a letter explaining where she had found it. Three weeks later, a photo arrived on her phone: an old woman sitting in a sunny courtyard with the thin hardback on her lap, open at the first page, and a smile Rosa had never seen on her face before.