Xanthe Westlake and her mother are looking for a fresh start as owners of an antique shop in the village of Marlborough when a 17th century silver chanelaine calls to Xanthe’s psychic powers and eventually takes her on a quest to save a young servant girl in 1605 (and maybe, in the process, meet a handsome young architect with oddly modern views on women).
Michael Main
Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live in. If she hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.

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Variants

(2)
  1. The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston (St. Martin’s Press, October 2018).
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Paula Brackston
  3. audio reading.
    The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston (Macmillan Audio, October 2018).
  4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Paula Brackston
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . narrated by Marisa Calin

Indexer Notes

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  1. Time Travel Model—Aghhhh! Paula Brackston comes within a whisker of creating a single static timeline. Xanthe thinks to herself that the time she knew ”could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. But alas, it all falls apart because she finds the crucial silver scizzors and needle case hidden in the present and then goes back to remove them from their hiding spot so that they are no longer hidden in that spot in her present. This was doubly sad because there was a slick solution that has her finding the items in the future and then taking them back to save Alice—and that solution would have created a cool static timeline.