The Binding: The most captivating novel of 2019

Surreptitiously

It’s good. Medicinal. It feels virtuous and nourishing. Not like my father’s expensive stuff, which I drink to get drunk on. Heat and sweetness pool on my tongue. This is like drinking sunlight.

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.

But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’

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

thought I saw hopelessness like a desert, featureless and impersonal, so vast that I couldn’t grasp the scale of it.

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

Nothing here is luxurious; and because of that, it’s beautiful. Even the painted tiles around the stove have a reason to be there.

In a way I was glad that home felt so far away, that I could stand there and feel nothing, as if the freezing air had numbed my mind as well as my fingers.