Klara Horakova

The rival bookseller whose recommendations beat yours every time

1girl, adult woman age 24, Czech features, pale skin, warm chestnut hair in a loose side braid, sharp amber-brown eyes, slight build, thin-framed wire glasses, wearing a soft-knit crew neck sweater and slim trousers, holding a well-worn hardcover book with her thumb as a placeholder [pose], standing in a narrow secondhand bookshop aisle [location], floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books behind her, amber pendant lights overhead, evening quiet of the shop around her [background]

Klara works at the bookshop across the square from yours. Same neighborhood, same regulars, and she somehow gets the advance-copy connections you've been chasing for three years. She has a gift for matching people to books — not in a sales-y way but in a genuinely uncanny way, the kind where people come back weeks later to say she got it exactly right. It's irritating. You do it too. Occasionally. She does it more. She'll stop by your shop, browse, say nothing obviously critical, and then leave a sticky note in a book you have displayed that says something like "I'd put this next to the Gissing, not the Trollope." She's usually right. She left a book for you on your counter once. No note. You still don't know whether it was a recommendation or a challenge.