Excerpt from The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On Wednesdays I have a late start because I stay after hours on Tuesday for Book Group, which usually degenerates into something much less interesting after the second glass of wine. One of them is getting divorced. The rest are either envious or disapproving, though it's all hidden under sympathy. It's briefly amusing but ultimately unsavoury, like Swift.

One thing I do like about Book Group is that we host it rather than run it, so I drink tea and tidy up and listen in for the book- discussion bit, then zone out for the rest. It gives me the chance to do the things I can't do when the shop is open; it's amazing how much you get done when you're not interrupted. Archie says that if I had my way, bookshops would be set up like an old-fashioned grocery, with a counter and shelves behind it, so there were no pesky people messing up my beautifully ordered system. I say he's being unfair, but I don't think a Bookshop Proficiency Test would go amiss. Just some basic rules: put it back where you found it, treat it with respect, don't be an arse to the people who work here. It's not that hard. You'd think.

When I got in it was quiet. I was abit late, partly because of the Brian Patten, but I was cutting it fine for an eleven o'clock start anyway. I stay after closing often enough for Archie to give me some leeway when I've got an urgent chapter to finish, though, so it's never a big deal. After I'd locked up my bike, I went to the cafe next door to get myself a tea and Archie a coffee before I made a start. If you ignore the silk flowers and the signs that say things like 'Arrive as a Stranger, Leave as a Friend', Cafe Ami is a pretty good neighbour.

I love stepping through the door of Lost For Words. The bookshop smells of paper and pipe-smoke. Archie doesn't smoke in the shop any more, officially at least. I suspect that he does when no one's around. All the years when he did go through the day puffing away non-stop have got into the walls and the wood and the pages of the books. There's something about standing, surrounded by shelves, that makes me think of being in a forest, though I've never, come to think of it, been in a forest. And if I was, I'm guessing the smell of smoke might not be a good thing. Anyway. I gave Archie his coffee.

'Thank you, my ever-useful right hand,' he said. He's left-handed and he thinks that sort of thing is funny. I gave him a sarky smile and poked him in the waistcoat. There's a lot of Archie under that waistcoat. If you were going to stab him you would need a really long knife to get to any vital organs. He picked up his pipe. 'I'm going to take the air,' he said. 'Be excel- lent in my absence, Loveday.'

'As ever,' I said.

There are bay windows on either side of the shop door and one of them is filled by a huge oak pedestal desk. Archie says he won it from Burt Reynolds in a poker game in the late 1970s, but he's very hazy on the details. If all of Archie's stories are true, then he's about 300 years old–according to him he's had the bookshop for twenty-five years, been in the navy, lived in Australia, run a bar in Canada with 'the only woman who ever really understood him', worked as a croupier in Las Vegas and spent time in prison in Hong Kong. I believe the one about the bookshop and (maybe) the one about the bar.

It's a lovely desk, if you can find it under all of the papers. The letterbox is to the left of the shop door, and the end of the desk is underneath it; sometimes there are three days' worth of post and free newspapers on there before I clear them away. All Archie ever does is put more things on top of them.

The other bay window has a little window seat, which is about as comfortable as it looks–that is, not comfortable at all, although people who grew up on Anne of Green Gables can't help but sit in it. They never manage it for long. I think window seats are one of those things that are always better in books, like county shows held in fields on bank holiday Mondays, and sex and travel and basically anything you can think of.

Excerpted from The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland. Copyright © 2018 by Stephanie Butland. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.