The Binding - BookWyrm

English language

ISBN:: 978-0-00-828859-4

(1 review)

Emmett Farmer is a binder’s apprentice. His job is to hand-craft beautiful books and, within each, to capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory.

If you have something you want to forget, or a secret to hide, he can bind it – and you will never have to remember the pain it caused.

In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books – and secrets – are meticulously stored and recorded.

Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of the volumes has his name on it.

1 edition

Justin Pickard reviewed The Binding by Bridget Collins

Compelling but unpleasant

3 stars

Read this in a single sitting, staying up until 4am to complete it, and the plot and thrust of the novel have stuck to me like clay, but can't say I enjoyed it. Reads like three very different books sutchered together. The first third is genuinely great, but gives way to something altogether murkier, manipulating the reader. A lot of gratuitous unpleasantness, ostensibly intended as – what? – class commentary, but in a way that felt, to me, at least, like writerly laziness.