The Margins of Us
A Novel

About this book:

Eleanor Vance treats books like patients—diagnosing foxing, mending spines, and guarding the silent contract between a volume and its history. Jasper Thorne treats them like currency—hunting first editions, charming heirs, and selling stories to the highest bidder. When a hoarder’s Victorian mansion forces them into a reluctant partnership to catalog the legendary Holloway library, their collision is inevitable: she sees preservation, he sees profit. But beneath the dust and the detritus of a brilliant, disordered mind, they discover a hidden room—a curated sanctuary of incunabula and secrets that rewrites everything they thought they knew about the collection, and each other.

As they race to document the shadow library before the heirs liquidate it, the line between professional rivalry and something far more dangerous begins to blur. Eleanor’s meticulous ethics war with Jasper’s ruthless pragmatism, yet every crumbling page they save together pulls them deeper into a mystery that spans centuries—and into a tension that no amount of archival gloves can protect against. In a house where every book is a brick in a fortress against the world, two people who speak different dialects of the same devotion must decide what they’re willing to risk: the collection, their careers, or the fragile, unexpected thing growing between them.

*The Margins of Us* is a love letter to the physical book—its scent, its scars, its stubborn survival—and a witty, atmospheric romance for anyone who has ever found a stranger’s note in a library copy and wondered about the life that left it there.