“’Their lives are barely recorded,’ Ma had said once, when I asked what happened to the women of Troy. ‘So their deaths aren’t worth writing about’. So say the poets, I thought. The men who hold the pen.”

The Bookbinder of Jericho is a companion novel to The Dictionary of Lost Words by Australian author, Pip Williams. Since they were twelve years old, Peggy Jones and her twin sister, Maude have worked as bindery girls at Clarendon Press. The tasks can be varied, but too often, Peggy finds herself reading when she should be folding, or gathering or sewing. And she has to watch out for Maude, whose distraction can lead to spoiled copies.

It’s one of the reasons Peggy hasn’t tried to advance her position, even though she’s smart enough: she promised Ma she would look after Maude. She’s unaware of what Helen Jones used to say to her best friend Tilda, Taylor: “Peg spends so much time looking back to see where Maude is, I’m afraid she’ll never move forward.”

Maude is different, special: “She stored phrases like a printer stored plates – the words set and ready to use when needed… Maude filtered conversation like a prism filters light.” Today she might be described as on the spectrum, but in 1914, Peggy underestimates her ability to adapt.

Each time she leaves the bindery to head home to their narrowboat, Calliope, Peggy looks longingly across Walton Street at Somerville College, where she would dearly love to Read English, to, one day, write for those voiceless women. But she knows that bindery girls, no matter how many books they secretly read, are never good enough to be accepted in those hallowed halls: the separation between Town and Gown might as well be a solid wall.

Just as the Press workforce is being depleted by men enlisting to fight the Germans, a compositor named Gareth Owens comes in with a special request: the bindery forewoman looks the other way, after hours, as Peggy helps him to fold, gather, and sew the book he has printed for his beloved. Women’s Words and Their Meanings has been compiled by Esme Nicoll and, watching old Eb bind the volume and gild the title, Peggy is proud to have been part of this secret project. It galvanises her desire to write.

When she was alive, Helen Jones filled Calliope with reading matter, taught her daughters to read, and discussed the classics. Later, Peggy thinks about the books, sections, manuscripts her mother had amassed: “They made Calliope even smaller, even tighter. ‘They will expand your world’, Ma had said. But if I hadn’t read them, I wouldn’t know how small my world was.”

But Peggy is unaware that there are people working behind the scenes to help fulfill that dream. When the opportunity is put in front of her, she is, at first, uncertain, despite encouragement from all around her. She will need to pass exams, to study. Ancient Greek was never on the curriculum at St Barnabas, and A Primer of Greek Grammar will become the most hated book she opens. Can she ever become a Somervillian?

The author’s meticulous research is apparent in every paragraph, but she weaves her wealth of information into the story with consummate subtlety: it never feels like a lesson. Peggy and Maude’s daily routine describes life on a narrowboat; Peggy’s volunteer work, reading and writing for injured servicemen, highlights the suffering caused by the war when she comes in contact with a Belgian soldier, Sgt Bastiaan Peeters, whose injuries include a horrible facial disfigurement.

If the scant detail of the letters received from their narrowboat neighbour, Jack Rowntree, conforms to the official version of life in the trenches, missives from Tilda in her VAD nursing role in France, cleverly bypassing the censor’s check, offer a more realistic view of the front. Oxford’s reception of Belgian refugees, despite the trauma they have clearly suffered, is not always charitable. All this against background of the struggles for Women’s Suffrage, and the devastating effects of the Spanish ‘flu pandemic.

At all times, Peggy’s love for books shines through: “Reading was such a quiet activity, and the reader in their parlour or leaning against the trunk of a tree would never imagine all the hands their book had been through, all the folding and cutting and beating it had endured. They would never guess how noisy and smelly the life of that book had been before it was put in their hands.”

Anyone who loved The Dictionary of Lost Words will be delighted to enter that world again. Williams gives the reader wonderful characters, such gorgeous prose that it’s hard to limit the quotes, and a plot to make you laugh, make you cry, make you feel. Utterly enthralling, this is historical fiction at its finest.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Better Reading Preview and Affirm Press.