The Nowhere Emporium

Ross MacKenzie's The Nowhere Emporium is a magic shop adventure for 9 year olds about a shop that simply appears in the middle of a row of shops.

What happens

One morning there are four shops in the row. The next morning there are five. The new one is built from bricks the colour of midnight, and by evening the whole village is standing outside it, swapping theories.

Then the door opens. A golden gate as fine as spider's web crumbles into dust. A dove goes up into the dark. And the sky spells out an invitation in fireworks. Bring your imagination.

Everyone goes in. Two days later the shop is gone and not one person can remember it was ever there. They can't remember the price of getting in either, which was a small piece of themselves.

That's the prologue. Then it's Glasgow, now, and Daniel Holmes is running through the Saturday shoppers because Spud Harper and his gang are after him.

Daniel dives through the nearest door and finds clocks and mirrors and rusty swords and columns of books, with a stuffed polar bear keeping watch in the corner. Behind a desk with eagle's feet sits a small man in a dusty suit, with eyes the colour of thunderclouds and a battered book that shivers as if something in it wants out.

Then two silver magpies burst through a red velvet curtain, land on the books, and shatter into rubies.

Daniel comes back the next day. And here's what changes everything. He remembers. Nobody remembers. The shopkeeper goes so quiet and so odd about it that you know straight away Daniel isn't an ordinary customer.

The book does a lot with smells, and it works. Toasted coconut and baking bread. Salt air, falling rain, bonfires, melting ice. The Emporium has a taste to it before it has any rules.

Please know that Daniel is an orphan and the book doesn't soften it. His dad was a fisherman who died at sea and his mum died a couple of years later. He cries for his dad in his sleep at the children's home, the older boys have heard him do it, and they use it. The bullying isn't played for laughs either. There's a planned ambush in a gym hall during a fire drill. For a child who worries, that first quarter is heavier going than the fireworks suggest.

What to read next

If they finish it wanting more of the shop, The Elsewhere Emporium is the one to go to next. That one starts with the Emporium missing, and Daniel out looking for it with Mr Silver's daughter Ellie.