Source A: The books on the court

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

By Daniel Malik

At six in the morning, the sports hall had become a ward for injured books. They lay open on folding tables, their pages raised like pale, swollen hands. Fans pushed cold air across the court, carrying the smell of river water, paper and mud into every corner.

Our instructions were brisk. Sort them into three groups: wet, drying, beyond repair. Nobody used words such as novel, atlas or poetry. The labels made everything simpler. They also made it possible not to think.

For the first hour, I worked quickly. I counted crates, changed sheets of absorbent paper and recorded numbers on a clipboard. Two hundred and sixteen books in the hall. Forty-three still at the library. Seventy-eight already condemned. The flood had turned stories into a problem that could be measured.

Then a red cookery book slipped from my hands. It fell open at a page stiff with dried flour. Beside a recipe, someone had written, ‘More ginger next time — Dad complained, then ate three.’ On another page, a child had drawn a crown around the word cake. The book was not rare. Its cover was split and its photographs had blurred into pink and brown clouds. Still, I carried it to the drying table instead of the bin.

By nine o’clock, people had begun arriving at the doors. They were not allowed onto the court, so they stood behind the barrier and described what they hoped we might find.

‘Blue cover. Birds on the front,’ said an elderly woman. ‘My husband used to read it when he couldn’t sleep.’

A boy asked about a book containing a dragon with one green wing. He remembered that the final page was already missing, as if this damage might help us recognise it.

A retired bus driver wanted the local history yearbook from 1987. ‘There’s a photograph of my first route,’ he explained. ‘Terrible uniform. Magnificent moustache.’

Their requests changed the room. The books were no longer a wet mass to be shifted from table to table. Each one seemed to trail an invisible thread through the barrier: into a kitchen, a bedroom, a school holiday, a life before someone had died. We began calling out discoveries. A gardening guide produced a cheer. The one-winged dragon was found beneath three dictionaries. Even the clipboard acquired names beside its numbers.

Not every book could be saved. Some collapsed when we lifted them, their sentences sliding away in grey strips. We placed these in black sacks, and the sacks gathered at the edge of the court like a row of closed doors. Yet people still told us what had been lost. They supplied endings, repeated favourite lines and argued cheerfully over titles. The stories had escaped before the water arrived.

Late that evening, I returned the red cookery book to its shelf in the reopened library. It leaned awkwardly between two clean replacements, its cover wrinkled and its pages permanently fat. It was no longer useful as a perfect set of instructions. It was useful as evidence: someone had cooked from it, laughed over it and passed it on.

When I switched off the light, I understood that we had not spent the day rescuing objects. We had been returning small pieces of people’s lives to the place where they could find one another.

How does Malik use language and structure to change the reader’s view of the damaged books?

Support your answer with detailed examples from the text, including brief quotations.