The last shelf

Source: an original fiction extract.

“On the final afternoon of the bookshop's sale, Ada helped her father clear the shelves. The shop would close at five. A removal van was due the next morning, and the landlord had asked for the keys by noon. Ada had spent most school holidays behind the counter, first drawing on scrap receipts, later making change. Now she sorted the unsold books into boxes marked KEEP, DONATE and PAPER. Her father had written the labels very neatly.

Without its books, the wall looked strangely unfinished. Pale rectangles showed where shelves had shielded the paint, and loose screws glittered in a saucer on the counter. The shop's familiar smell seemed to have thinned: paper, dust and the faint bitter trace of coffee. Even the bell above the door sounded exposed, a small bright note with nothing soft left to catch it.

Ada found a gardening book with a cracked spine. Inside, beside a photograph of an apple tree, someone had written a date in blue ink. She put it in KEEP. Her father moved it to DONATE without looking inside. 'We can't take everything,' he said. Ada opened her mouth, then closed it. There were already six boxes in the car, and at home the hallway was too narrow for two people to pass each other.

The bell rang. A customer Ada recognised but could not name stood in the doorway, looking at the empty wall. He asked whether there were any gardening books left. Her father pointed to the box. The man found the cracked volume and smiled. 'I bought this here years ago. Gave it away when I moved.' He opened it at the apple tree. The date was his daughter's birthday, he explained; they had planted a tree that spring. Ada watched him turn the page carefully.

At five, her father locked the door. Ada carried the saucer of screws to the car while he checked the lights. Through the window she could see the pale marks on the wall. They still looked wrong. But the gardening book was no longer in any box, and somewhere a man was carrying it home. Ada set the saucer on the passenger seat, held the last empty carton open and waited for her father to bring the sign.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the loss felt as the bookshop is emptied. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.