More Twelve Booky Days posts for the holidays. I tell this story every year at this time, as it encompasses nearly all my favourite things: books, writers, the kindness of strangers, the sort of miraculous coincidence that would never be plausible in fiction. Also a cracking good Christmas story.

A few years ago, I spent six weeks in a tiny village on Penobscot Bay in Maine, where the local library became a favourite haunt (it was everything a good library should be). Here I read my way steadily through Lee Child’s Jack Reacher ouvre. Not my usual fare, but I was keeping my grieving friend Karina company. After the death of her husband, she had turned to Lee Child’s thrillers for escape. But her first Christmas as a widow was approaching, and she was all out of Reacher books to read. Meanwhile, a Cambridge academic and surfer, Andy Martin, was about to publish a book on Lee Child’s writing process. I forgive Twitter everything because it somehow enabled Andy and Karina to connect online. They didn’t know each other; but when I offered to buy her a copy of his book (not available in South Africa), he said he was in the States, and he’d send a signed copy for me to mule back to her.

Here’s the amazing story of how, at the little Post Office in Castine, Maine, where the employees acted as my own personal Santa storage depot, not one, but TWO gift books showed up: dedicated to Karina and me and signed not only by the author, but by Lee Child himself. And all kinds of things followed from that; Andy came out to the Open Book festival in Cape Town the following year, and we got to Skype chat with Lee himself.

Time keeps passing, Lee keeps writing (so does Andy, and so does his wife Heather Martin, currently working on Lee’s biography), and we check in on each other online. We have each other’s books by now (I particularly enjoyed Andy’s two books on surfing), and I feel a warm glow every time I see Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me on my shelf.

This year, Andy published another book, this time not on Lee’s writing process, but his readers. Called With Child, it’s an account of how a book is marketed and received (required reading for everyone who thinks writing a book means lolling about on couches or in coffee-shops with a laptop), and also a colourful parade of real characters, with stories that are bizarre, hilarious and poignant. And there’s a chapter on Karina. It’s the most poignant of them all, even more so than the one about the man with terminal cancer and weeks to live, whose dying wish was to read the latest Jack Reacher novel, not yet released — and who had an advance copy sent to him in hospital.

I read the chapter on Karina first, but then I went back and read the entire book, utterly absorbed — it’s darkly funny, philosophy pops up at the most unexpected moments, and as a study of the work, responsibilities of and restrictions on a blockbuster writer, it’s fascinating. Highly recommended, and not just because I have a tiny walk-on part in it (as @Heckitty).

And then I read the Acknowledgements, with no small degree of disbelief. As my niece says, I can now retire: I have billing, in alphabetical order, with Tom Cruise. Oh, and Stephen King. And Karin Slaughter. See for yourself. *bows, accepts flowers, thanks family, manager, high-school English teacher, etcetera*

On the day before Christmas, I found this — the only Reacher book Karina doesn’t have — in a local charity shop. Yet another improbable, delightful coincidence.