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

There was plenty for me to do. I know you're supposed to appreciate a lie-in, but I always just feel as though I've let the day get away from me and I'll never catch up. The only benefit is that I don't have to bring in the bags of books people leave in the doorway because they can't differentiate between a second- hand bookshop and a charity shop.

My dad's mum always used to be up with the sun. I can still hear her saying, 'Best part of the day, little one,' with her voice burring and her eyes smiling. My dad's parents were the first people I knew who died. We went to Cornwall twice that year, once in spring when Granny died of stomach cancer, then again in autumn when Grandpa followed her, and everyone shook their heads and said 'broken heart'. I suppose I was four or five. I remember thinking it was strange that Dad's parents had died but Mum was the one crying. The beach we used to go to near Falmouth–where my dad was from–was like a beach from a storybook: in my memory, the sand is yellow, the sea felt-tip-pen blue.We lived near the sea at home in Whitby, but the Cornish beach was different. It was magical. After Grandpa died, we didn't go back. Dad always said that there was no love lost between him and Auntie Janey, so I suppose there was no reason to.

I started with a bit of a tidy-up and I went on to the customer enquiries. Archie's an unreliable computer-user–he can do it, but he's erratic–so I looked at the emails first, sitting at the desk while he puffed away at his pipe outside on the pavement. There was nothing significant: an enquiry about a book we didn't have, an online sale. Five minutes and they were done, and then I looked through the box of enquiry slips. I started leaving them out for customers to fill in themselves because Archie only passes on the queries he thinks are interesting.

There was only one new one, and it was for a book we had a copy of in the storeroom upstairs, so I dug it out and put it in a brown paper bag, wrote the customer's name on it, phoned the customer to say it was waiting, and put it on the shelf behind the desk. It was a Jean M. Auel, something Archie would definitely have considered below his notice. It might have only been a fiver but I'd bet good money that all of my fiver book sales add up to more than Archie's precious first editions. In fact, I don't need to bet. I see the figures. Archie takes me to the meetings with the accountant, so I can listen to the bits he misses. He starts by nodding and then nods off, double-chin to chest. It's funny, he looks small when he's sleeping. When he's awake, and he's talking, he seems too big for the shop, too big for York, although he says the city is perfect for him. I asked him once how he ended up with the shop and he said, 'It was time to be contained,' which is a ridiculous answer. Another time he told me that he came to York to see a friend, 'got overly merry', and bought the business on a whim. Also ridiculous, but more likely to be true.

Ben, who does house clearances and brings the books to us, had brought in a couple of boxes and, judging from the spines of the books I could see, they were going to be a welcome addition to the Music Biography (Classical) section: there was my work for the day. I like it when boxes like that come in, with a theme rather than a hotchpotch of collected living. It makes me feel as though I'm spending time with someone who had a bit of substance. Plus, there's always the possibility of what Archie calls buried treasure. A person with a passion is more likely to have bought and kept first editions and tracked down rare things for the sake of their content, but they won't have thought about financial value, because the value, for them, is all in the pages. Personally, I'm with them, but as Archie loves to point out, I'm not the one paying the rent.

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.