June 2025
Independent Bookshop Week – Kibworth Books
Kibworth Books Bio
Kibworth Books is a friendly and inclusive bookshop in the heart of a thriving village community in rural Leicestershire. It has been a mainstay of Kibworth’s High Street since 2009, when it was set up by Debbie James, who had decided that she just needed to be surrounded by books all day, and realise her childhood dream of having a bookshop.
After 12 years gradually outgrowing a small Victorian terrace, Debbie and her team moved the bookshop into a space four times as big at ‘The Barn’, also on the village’s High Street. This newly-renovated shop comprises ‘The Great Hall’ for brand new fiction and non-fiction, ‘The Children’s Room’, ‘The Nook’, filled with cards, stationery and gifts, and ‘The Daker Room’ which houses the second-hand, rare, collectable and antiquarian book collection. The larger shop-space has enabled the rolling-out of an ever-growing events programme, hosting talks from novelists, poets, comedians, artists and musicians, scientists, philosophers and linguists, naturalists, journalists and politicians.
Over the years we have won Regional Independent Bookshop of the Year, Vintage Independent Bookshop of the Year, Caboodle Bookshop of the Month, three James Patterson Awards for our work promoting children’s books and the BA’s Diversity and Inclusivity Award. Most recently we were finalists in the British Book Awards 2025 for Children’s Bookseller of the Year and Individual Bookseller of the Year (Kirsty, our Children’s Specialist Bookseller).
Our bookshop is a safe space, where everyone is welcome. As well as our passion for books and reading, for the sake of our business, our stakeholders and the planet, sustainability is also at the heart of all we do.
What inspired you to open your bookshop, was it a lifelong love of reading?
Debbie, the bookshop owner and founder, opened the bookshop in 2009. Books have always been a huge part of her life. Just being around books has always felt comforting and almost magical. Having been raised by book loving parents – a librarian and a teacher – Debbie had always dream of creating an environment where other people could share that love of books and reading, so opening a bookshop seemed like the natural thing to do!
Do you have any particularly memorable moments from your time as a bookseller, such as author events or release days?
There are so many memorable moments! Favourites for us include school visits with authors. There’s a kind of magic that happens when you take a guest author into a school. Watching the children light up and engage is a beautiful thing. So much excitement and buzz is created around books and reading when a ‘real life author’ is standing in front of a group of students and it hugely feeds into creating a strong culture of reading for pleasure. It gives children that inspiration and validation too that maybe, just maybe, they could write books too and that their own stories matter. The feedback from schools about the impact these school visits have had on the children they work with really does fuel us.
There are lots of memorable moments on the shop floor too. A recent interaction with a customer which genuinely made us a bit weepy was with a grandparent who came to thank us for supplying them with a board book for their grandchild with SEND. They came to tell us about the impact that one book had had on the child and it honestly made our day! Every customer really, really does matter to us, so we love all of these small interactions and every bit of feedback keeps us going to create the most welcoming, inclusive and inspiring bookshop space we possibly can.
Is there any genre within children’s publishing that you feel publishers should focus on more and if so, why?
There’s no doubt that the demand for graphic novels and comic style fiction is huge right now, and rightly so. It would be great to see publishers thinking about how to engage with this format for ‘tween’ readers – readers who are 11+ but not yet ready for graphic novels with more adult content – and with clear age guidance ratings made visible on the back of books.
In mid-grade, one thing we’re asked for is ‘gentle’ fiction for sensitive readers aged 9-12. Some children can’t cope with ‘peril’ and don’t want stories which deal with tough topics, e.g. grief, mental health, bullying etc. They just want great escapist, happy fiction which won’t leave them scared or worried. We often recommend titles such as By Ash, Oak and Thorn by Melissa Harrison for readers like this but it would be great to see more titles coming through with a similar feel.
If you could have any fictional character visit your bookshop, who would it be and why?
This is such a tough question! I’m a bit partial to Gordon from the Gordon the Meanest Goose on Earth by Alex Latimer and, as a dog lover, I’d love to welcome Henry the Artistic Dog (by Justin Worsley) or any of the dogs from The Great Dog Bottom Swap (Peter Bently). If you’re familiar with these stories however you’ll know that a visit from just one of these characters could result in utter chaos which is perhaps not something we want to unleash on the bookshop! I love the character of Aaliyah too from Fight Back by AM Dassu. She goes on such a journey of discovery in this book and I hugely admire her bravery and tenacity, despite the challenges she faces dealing with people in her life who hold racist and Islamophobic views. I’d love to have her and all her school pals visit the shop. I’d ask her to create a table display of great books for inspiring empathy, kindness and anti-racist activism and we’d invite in schools and the wider community to listen to her speak.
Do you have a favourite book that you would recommend to young readers and their families?
Gosh! That’s an almost impossible question to answer as we love so much children’s literature! Thinking about recent reads we’ve loved, we’d definitely recommend The Line They Drew Through Us by Hiba Noor Khan. It so deftly handles the very big historical topic of partition in India and opens up important conversations about colonialism but all within the context of brilliant storytelling and with characters who leap off the page. For older readers we are huge fans of local author Tamsin Winter and her latest book, I Dare You, is no exception. This one tackles the issue of teens engaging with online challenges but everything Tamsin writes is important and compelling so we’d recommend reading all of her books. For a hilarious read for younger readers, we adored Boss of the Underworld by Tor Freeman. Trust us, it’s utterly brilliant! Finally, we are huge fans of the Every Cherry range here at Kibworth Books, so we’d heartily recommend any title from this range to our customers who may be supporting readers with additional needs.
What has been the most rewarding part of running your bookshop?
It might sound like a cliché but it really is true – getting the right book into the right hands at the right time. Everything we do is driven by a love of books and a desire to connect readers with them. Books really can change hearts, minds, the world! So helping customers, whether they are children, grown ups, school customers etc, to find the perfect book for them is the biggest reward. When customers come back to us and share feedback on how much they loved a book or how it’s impacted them, it means the world to us.
Finally, why is it more important than ever for readers to support indie bookshops across the UK and Ireland?
Indie bookshops and indie booksellers are all, in their own way, activists and an indie bookshop is a retail space like no other. At the heart of the mission of any indie is, I would almost certainly guarantee, a desire to do good within their communities. We’re living in a world where empathy and kindness and community spirit is needed now more than ever, and indie bookshops are passionate about being part of building a better world. Within our own context at Kibworth Books, we work really hard to look for opportunities to support our community, not least through schemes such as our Pay It Forward project and our partnerships with Baby Basics, the UHL Play Specialist team at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and local schools. We give a lot of time and thought to ensuring the curation of our book stock reflects the diverse and inclusive world we want to live in, and we put wider global issues such as sustainability and care of our environment at the heart of our practices.
And we’re just one bookshop. Across the UK and Ireland there are booksellers working their socks off to make an impact for good. And it’s not just the social impact, indie bookshops create huge benefits for the local economy and diversity of our high streets, all whilst paying their taxes!
But bookshops can only exist with support. Choosing where we spend our money is choosing what kind of world we want to live in. A choice to support indie bookshops is an act of hope and commitment that creating a kinder world is possible. Plus, it’s a joyous experience visiting an indie bookshop, and who wouldn’t want to have a little joy in their life?!
