The Corner Shop- Babita Sharma

‘I come from a hidden world: I am the daughter of shopkeepers. For more than a decade we, a family of five, ate, slept, lived and worked in a corner shop. I came to know a lot about you- whether your politics leaned to the right or the left, whether you were gay or straight, whether you were strapped for cash or well-off- but there was a world beyond the counter that you never knew…’

With the world currently in the grip of a pandemic, never have we been so reliant on our corner shops. But how much do we know or notice the people behind the counter? A whizz through the twentieth century history of WW2, immigration, Margaret Thatcher and racial tensions, this engaging book is also the human story behind the changing institution of the corner shop and its importance to society as we know it.