The Binding

In a world where bookbinders trap unwanted memories inside books, leaving people lighter but hollowed out, Emmett Farmer is sent to apprentice with an aging binder after an illness no one will name. He learns to marble paper and tool leather while forbidden from the locked room where the finished books are stored. When a wealthy young man named Lucian Darnay arrives, Emmett feels a pull he cannot place, and a book bearing his own name reveals the memories that were taken from him. The novel unfolds across three sections that piece together a love already lived and erased, asking what a person becomes when their past is sold for the comfort of forgetting.