The Binding: The most captivating novel of 2019

The colours are so bright I feel like I’ve got a fever. Tiny details catch my eye: the lustre on a string of pearls, the starry bubbles in a glass of champagne, a beauty spot on a bare shoulder.

what made someone an artist, not a mere artisan.

‘Binding and doctoring always used to go together. Easing the pain, easing people into life and out of it.’

She leant towards me. I smelt soap and glue and the leather of her apron.

was so cold I went into a sort of dream, where I was the marsh and the house as well as myself, where I was slippery wet wood and claggy mud …

Gossip is public property.

‘She’s a living anachronism. One would think we were in the Dark Ages.

All I want is to find a shadow somewhere and dissolve into it.

Surreptitiously

Perhaps there was a way I could keep my memories, as if my own heart was a secret book made of muscle and blood. No one would know.