A few years ago I read and enjoyed The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams, so I’m pleased to have the opportunity to read her follow up novel, The Bookbinder of Jericho, which won the Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) General Fiction Book of the Year for 2024.

Here’s what the backcover has to say about what’s “inside the book”:

“The Bookbinder of Jericho is a story about knowledge – who makes it, who can access it, and what is lost when it is withheld.

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of studying at Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her. When refugees arrive from the devastated cities of Belgium, it sends ripples through the community and through the sisters’ lives. Peggy begins to see the possibility of another future where she can use her intellect and not just her hands, but as war and illness reshape her world, it is love, and the responsibility that comes with it, that threaten to hold her back.”

As a lover of words, books, and historical fiction, this book does sound like core Helen reading, so having already enjoyed The Dictionary of Lost Words I am fairly confident of reading satisfaction ahead. 😀