Bookmark

Cal is a hand bookbinder in a lane with no name on any map. His daughter Isla is seven, and alive. In the spring her fever came down on the third night, and that is all he lets himself know about it.

Then a county history he rebound when she was one comes back to the shop, and it is not quite the same book. A line of crayon on a river is there on Tuesday and gone on Friday. A word turns up in the back, in his own hand, that he never wrote. Something is reading Isla, gently, every afternoon. And somewhere a coast has been taken off the map, and the only one who has noticed is a bookbinder with his thumb on the wrong page.

Far above the city, on a shelf that no one built, the keepers have begun to mark his book for the knife.

Bookmark is the second book of Unread, the trilogy that began with Spine: a story about a man who mends things so that you can see where they broke, the thing that wants to keep everything, and what it costs to close a door.