Yesterday I went into Gosford Books in Coventry to look for a book for a friend. I had a look over the novels section but didn’t see it. There didn’t seem to be any particular order to the books there anyway. So I asked the owner if he had the book. ‘The Four Feathers, by A. E. W. Mason? Yes, here it is’, he said, as he pulled it out of the middle of the shelf I’d just been looking at.
That’s a proper bookshop, where the shop assistant can find a book immediately even when you don’t know who the author is yourself. There was one in Nairobi that was similar. I couldn’t remember the name of the author or the title of the book, so I described what it was about and the person in the shop said ‘Ah yes, The Last Time they Met, that’s by Anita Shreve’. Try that in Waterstones, and you’ll get ‘Have you looked in the fiction section?’
One of my favourite passages from the book so far:
"Mrs. Adair… was naturally, behind her pale and placid countenance, a woman of tortuous and intriguing mind. She preferred to look through the keyhole even when she could walk straight in at the door; and knowledge which could be gained by a little manoeuvring was always more desirable and precious in her eyes than any information which a simple question would elicit. She avoided, indeed, the direct question on a perverted sort of principle, and she thought a day very well spent if at the close of it she had outwitted a companion into telling her spontaneously some trivial and unimportant piece of news which a straightforward request would have at once secured for her at breakfast time."