The Bookbinder of Jericho (UK) / The Bookbinder (US)
Oxford 1914, and Peggy Jones’ job involves folding folios of paper and making up volumes in the Clarendon Press bindery in Oxford. She is an orphan and also has the responsibility of looking after her twin sister Maude who, while working alongside her, is what was then termed “feeble-minded”, but today would probably be recognized as having some form of autism. Peggy has an appetite and a passion for learning and finds it frustrating that she can only glimpse short sentences and parts of the books she works upon, and hence furnishes the narrow boat she shares with her sister with parts of books in various conditions that have been rejected as substandard by her employers. Peggy is also a supporter of the suffragette movement and sees an opportunity to advance herself in her place of employment as the country enters the Great War in an orgy of patriotic enthusiasm. She volunteers as a reader and writer for patients at a local hospital and there becomes very close to Bastiaan, a severely damaged Belgian man.
There are excellent details on the painstaking process of bookbinding by hand, as well as the challenges and pressures that the country’s entrance into the conflict present to those left to keep affairs running. It is a well-written and thoroughly engaging story, and although the themes of social inequality, emancipation and the horrors of the Great War are essential and relevant, the general subject, style and mood of the novel felt like so many similar books I have read in recent years.
