The Binding by Bridget Collins review – magical tale of supernatural books | Books | The Guardian

The Binding by Bridget Collins review – magical tale of supernatural books | Books | The Guardian:

Bridget Collins’s fantasy novel, her first for adults, begins sombrely, with its teenage hero Emmett being sent away from his family farm to become an apprentice to a binder of books. He’s weak after a long illness of a mysterious nature and, from his family’s strained behaviour, we intuit that he’s in some kind of disgrace he doesn’t fully understand. When he arrives at the isolated house of Seredith, the elderly woman to whom he’s apprenticed, it’s both an exile and a haven. He spends his days learning to make endpapers, tool leather, gilding – the delicate physical labour of making beautiful books. But he soon realises that the true work of binding is magical, manifested in the way that lives are turned into stories.