have book, will travel – Nicola Weideling

In the vein of Diane Setterfield and Natasha Pulley, The Binding is rich immersive, spellbinding storytelling at its best.

Emmett Farmer is summoned by a master binder, Seredith, to leave his farming life and become her apprentice. But this is no ordinary type of bookbinding. Binding is a feared craft that creates suspicion in the community; it enables someone to erase a set of memories, secreting their unwanted knowledge away into a book unique to them. Not as a novel, but as a true story unique to them, binding their memories to the page.

Emmett learns what it means to bind someone’s memories and how high the cost can be. Because memories have value not just to their owners but to others…and they are prepared to pay handsomely for them. And if a book is destroyed, the memories are returned to their owner all in one emotional moment.

This is a thought-provoking novel with genuine emotional depth. The character names feel almost Dickensian, in that they have obviously been lovingly crafted to suit each character, in true storytelling style.

My one quibble is that there is a significant shift of tone and narrative halfway through the novel; it moves from a tale of fantasy to one of forbidden love. I am not complaining, as I enjoyed the second half just as much, but after finishing The Binding, I felt as if I had read two novels not one. And please don’t let that put you off, the two halves do complement each other neatly.

This is going to be a huge hit in 2019 – I read it in proof format (thank you, NetGalley) and can’t wait to get my hands on a printed copy; in deference to its binding subject-matter, the cover is gorgeous!

I decided to request this on NetGalley when I saw that it was described as “A gripping contemporary Gothic thriller… Wilkie Collins and MR James meet Gone Girl and Disclaimer”; I do love a Gothic thriller!

Clare Cassidy is a literature teacher specialising in the Gothic writer RM Holland, about whom she teaches a short course  every year. Then Clare’s life and work collide tragically when one of her colleagues is found dead, a line from an RM Holland story by the body. The investigating police detective is convinced the writer’s works somehow hold the key to the case. And Claire realises she is right when, after the (first) murder, she notices some other writing in her diary. Writing that isn’t hers…

I enjoyed this novel, particularly the meta narrative element of the novel. Elly Griffiths ‘quotes’ regularly from Holland’s work throughout The Stranger Diaries and in fact opens the novel with a long extract from his most famous short story, before shifting the reader cleverly into the main story arc by introducing Clare’s creative writing group deconstructing the Gothic story.

The only quibble I had was with the ‘big reveal’ – I wasn’t necessarily convinced by the murderer or his motive. However, it was a lot of fun getting to the denouement and I really enjoyed reading it.