The Bookbinder of Jericho

Like everyone else, I loved The Dictionary of Lost Words, and I joined the long queue of eager readers waiting to take Pip Williams' companion novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, out of the library. I enjoyed it even more than the first book; definitely worth the wait.

Peggy works in the bindery, the workshop where books like the dictionary are physically sorted, bound and sewn together. She and her twin, Maude, have just lost their mother, so they're living in their canal boat home alone. Calliope is lined with flawed and rejected products of the bindery, so Peggy is well-read, and longs to be a scholar; but Maude needs her. Then the war comes and turns everything upside down.

The weight of Peggy's responsibility for her sister hit me hard, and her tentative relationship with the wounded Belgian soldier, Bastiaan, was very touching. Again, Williams highlights the way that women's sacrifice is taken for granted -- there are no fancy memorials to the women who died caring for the sick during the Spanish flu epidemic that took twice as many lives as the war itself.

The Bookbinder of Jericho is another steady, thoughtful, deeply satisfying novel that wears its historic detail lightly. Dare I hope that Pip Williams is working on a third Oxford volume about women and words and resistance?