Only a few blocks from Chip & Pepper, New York's [McNally Robinson] is a very pleasant bookshop. Open since 2005, it's a little nicer than the ones in Winnipeg. The Tea Room isn't quaking with River Heights sycophants, queue-cutting for the last Imperial cookie. Rather, it is filled with calm, young New Yorkers, gazing industriously into their laptops. It's the middle of a weekday afternoon, but there is a lineup at the cash register. Literary events appear to be organized almost nightly. It has all the trappings of a very smart, successful bookstore.

"I don't see myself as a Manitoba business," she says, "rather as a New York one."

I immediately take out my birth certificate and show it to him. "Look!" I say, "I'm from Manitoba!"