‘Let’s start a chapter of our own’: the couples who found love in bookshops

Lovers living out their Notting Hill fantasies, shy readers whose eyes met at a book club … readers give us a tour of the romance section for Valentine’s Day

‘I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” It’s been more than 25 years since Julia Roberts delivered that famous line to Hugh Grant in a travel bookshop at the end of Notting Hill. But romantic moments in bookshops are not just a big-screen fantasy: for these couples, bookshops have played a key role in their real-life love stories.

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