Lara's began with a name. My mother gave me my middle name after Lara in Doctor Zhivago — not a princess or an heiress, but a woman a poet wrote about while they were snowed into a house in the middle of a revolution.

 

The novel itself was banned in Russia, smuggled out in a suitcase and printed in secret, because a love story was considered that dangerous.

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I've carried her name my whole life. When I began imagining a bookshop devoted entirely to love stories — hardbacks, limited editions, first printings, books made to be kept — the name was already there.

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I'm not trying to fit in as many books as possible. I'm trying to choose the ones you'll want to keep.

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Lara's opens on North Parade, Oxford, in summer 2027.