The BookNook

Leanne and Jasmine opened the Book Nook on Upper Craigs in September 2020 — which is to say they opened a bookshop in the middle of a pandemic, in a year when opening anything looked like folly. It worked. The shop pairs a well-kept range with a café, the two-hander that keeps an independent bookshop's lights on, and it has drawn a run of national coverage — the Scotsman, the Herald, the Big Issue, the National — unusual for a business barely five years old. Stirling is a university town that had gone short of a proper independent bookshop; the Book Nook filled the gap and made it a habit, the sort of place students and locals treat as a second front room. Coffee, a browse, and an owner behind the counter who chose every book on the shelf. Opened against the odds and still here — which in bookselling counts for a good deal.