To call THE BOOKBINDER a coming-of-age, early-feminist or lost-innocence story may seem rather trite and dismissive. But in the deeper and more difficult layers of meaning where this thoroughly engaging novel goes, Pip Williams’ vibrant storytelling is all of these things and much, much more.

Coming a scant three years after her bestselling debut, THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS, THE BOOKBINDER continues Williams’ endearing yet powerful evocation of aspiring working women’s lives during the turbulent early 20th century before, during and after World War I and the Spanish influenza epidemic.

"Pip Williams again exceeds all expectations. One can only hope that she has more tales to tell from this fascinating world, whose remnants can still be found in 21st-century England."

The story this time recounts the experiences of orphaned twin girls Peggy and Maude, who live on a canal longboat in the Jericho neighborhood of Oxford, a local equivalent of “the wrong side of the tracks.” Although identical in appearance, they are very different in character, social skills, cognitive abilities and just about everything else. Yet they are also oddly compatible as they fend for themselves with help from family-like longboat friends, to whom their differences are so accepted as to be virtually unnoticeable.

Yet it is clear that Peggy, the bright, ambitious and sensitive twin who is the book’s first-person narrator, had a more fortunate start in life than her second-born sister Maude, who suffered an unexplained difficulty at birth and is considered “slow” but with some remarkable savant abilities. Today, we would call her “neurodiverse,” but no other details are offered.

Both girls have worked since childhood in the book bindery of Oxford University Press. Their task, day in and day out, is to precisely fold printed sheets to be sewn into quires and bound into hardcover books, just as their late mother did. Maude is content to be a rapid and expert folder who creates fanciful paper objects in her free time from waste sheets. Peggy, often scolded for trying to read snippets of the books whose pages she folds (and takes damaged books home whenever possible), longingly eyes the women’s college across the road with its vast library of complete books --- a library she is told she can never enter. So near yet so far.

Forced to quit school too early to support their small single-parent family, and now themselves, both girls seem permanently stuck behind the barriers of “town and gown” class divisions, chronic poverty, patriarchy and the government-legislated inferiority that suffragettes of the time were vigorously working to overturn with their votes-for-women demonstrations. As they grow into young adulthood, those barriers seem to grow ever higher until 1914, when war breaks out in Europe, followed closely by the Spanish flu pandemic. Working-class women are suddenly recruited to do jobs normally filled by men or their social superiors.

An influx of refugees who need temporary shelter, work and respite in England, along with a rising tide of wounded and ill soldiers needing hospitalization, become both a double tragedy and an opportunity for Peggy, Maude and the other “bindery girls.” Changes to the flow of publishing work, calls for volunteer nurses, and the forging of new relationships all become part of a “new normal” that impacted every level of British society. And this is where THE BOOKBINDER subtly transitions from a late Edwardian period piece into a visceral re-enactment of daily life within the confluence of real and catastrophic historical events.

What drives the narrative even more is Williams’ diligent and meticulous research into the serial effects of war, even far from the front --- the plight of refugees and soldiers tormented by PTSD (of which appallingly little was known or cared about); the social abhorrence of combat survivors whose faces were horribly disfigured; the disillusionment of countless women who excelled in “men’s jobs,” only to be pushed back into menial low-wage occupations; and the toll of influenza that killed the rich and the poor indiscriminately.

As THE BOOKBINDER draws to a close --- and there seems to be so much more to tell --- you realize there can be no simple happily-ever-after for any of Williams’ richly contoured characters. Instead, there are multiple endings and beginnings. Those who are lost, through death or severed relationships, are remembered and cherished. Those who, like the intellectually driven Peggy, aspire to change the world meet some (but not all) of their goals. Even those like Maude, who seem content on the surface, embrace unimagined inner change as they all regroup to embark on a very different postwar decade.

Who would have thought that books and houseboats could be such remarkable story companions? Pip Williams again exceeds all expectations. One can only hope that she has more tales to tell from this fascinating world, whose remnants can still be found in 21st-century England.