Like Pip Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, The Bookbinder is great for fans of historical fiction. You should definitely read it if you have read The Dictionary of Lost Words. The Bookbinder is also set in Oxford during the early twentieth century and focuses on the suffrage movement in England and WWI. Some characters from The Dictionary of Lost Words make an appearance in this novel.

The Bookbinder is told from the perspective of the working-class woman. The main character is Peggy Jones, who is around twenty when the novel begins. She works as a bookbinder at the Oxford University Press where she folds and sews the pages that make up the books. Peggy also takes care of her twin sister, Maude, who is autistic, since their mother’s death a few years earlier. While Maude is content with life, Peggy is restless and wants more from life. She wants to be one of the female students at Oxford’s Somerville College, but workers like her with little formal education do not attend college. She also has Maude to think about as Maude cannot be left on her own.

Then WWI begins and the arrival of Belgian refugees in Oxford brings changes to Peggy and Maude’s lives. The Bookbinder is by no means full of thrills and excitement. It tells the quiet story of the women who were left behind in England while the men in their lives went off to fight. What I mean to say is that women’s efforts during the war do not get much recognition. As one character in the novel remarks, no one builds monuments for women and their sacrifices. But this does not make The Bookbinder any less interesting, at least not if you are a woman and can relate to Peggy’s situation.

The conflict in this story comes from Peggy grappling with her desires and her responsibility to her sister, as well as her bitter feelings towards her place in society. Even though women really stepped up during the war and nursed soldiers with horrific injuries and took over jobs when there were no men left to do them, there was still a divide between the upper-class and the working-class.  This tension between the classes plays out in Peggy’s friendship with Gwen, a Somerville student who does not take her studies seriously because she does not really need an education when she has wealth. Peggy is often angry with Gwen because she makes everything seem possible when it isn’t, such as Peggy becoming a Somerville student herself.

Williams could have made things easy for Peggy, but she made The Bookbinder feel more authentic with Peggy’s disappointments and the hard decisions she must make. This does not mean that the novel is a bummer, it just means that Peggy’s story is probably not what you will expect.