The girl behind the desk at the Foxhollow Humane Society has a tired, practised smile, the kind worn by someone who has watched a great many visitors walk past the back kennels. Claire Ashford does not ask for a puppy. She asks which animal has been there longest, and the girl takes her to a room with a single cage, where an old retriever mix with a gray muzzle and one bent ear lies on a threadbare blanket. His name is Gus. He has been waiting nearly a year, because people pass him over for his age. Claire takes him, and his blanket too. The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson is full of bigger magic than this, but the shelter visit is the clearest statement of its faith: that what gets overlooked is usually what most deserves keeping.
Claire Counts to Five
The woman who adopts Gus is a librarian in a salt-weathered Massachusetts town, and she has not slept properly in years. Anderson writes the insomnia from the inside. Claire breathes in for five counts and out for five, rinses her mug three times, checks the lock and checks it again, and folds the same dish towel until its corners align. She traces a line through the air above a study table because leaving it unfinished would itch all day. These habits shade toward obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the novel treats them with unusual tenderness, as the scaffolding of someone holding herself upright rather than as quirks to be cured by a kiss.
The thing she is holding onto is the library, a founder’s mansion of stained glass and stone that the town board wants to sell. Claire has started to suspect the building is alive: shelves seem to lean toward readers, lost gloves resurface between cookbooks, and one night a door appears in the archives that was never there before. Behind it are books that contain the memories of the people who have passed through. That premise drives the plot, but The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson is at its most convincing when it stays close to Claire’s nerves.
Her father, Jack, a firefighter newly retired, is the comic counterweight. He calls three times a day, campaigns for her to get a pet, and greets any man in her kitchen with whisky and a long look. The relationship has more weight than it first appears, and the late scenes between father and daughter are among the quietest and best in The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson.
Grace Runs the Whole Town
Every reader will come away with a favourite, and it will be Grace. Nearly seventy, with fierce red lipstick and a silver streak through her black curls, she has worked the circulation desk since before Claire was born and has slipped so completely into the family that nobody remembers her arriving. When the closure is announced, she proposes a séance on the grounds that ghosts are free and lawyers are not. She gets thrown out of bingo for heckling the caller after a romantic betrayal involving a man known for his tomatoes. She keeps a laminated badge in her desk drawer naming herself interim head librarian, just in case leadership is ever thrust upon her.
Anderson gives Grace the funniest lines and also the gentlest work. It was Grace who turned up with groceries when Claire’s mother died, and stayed. It was Grace who packed bags of library books for a sick child years ago. Her running semi-romance with Jack, conducted entirely through insults and shared guest rooms, is one of the book’s small delights. If there is a fault, it is that her nicknames for the brooding artist in the corner multiply past the point of wit.
The Memory of Borrowed Books Has a Trespassing Problem
That artist is Julian Thomas, and the romance is where the novel is least sure of itself. One of the books Claire carries home contains his past, and she reads it. She watches his first love, his closest friendship and the night something broke, all before he has told her anything at all. The book knows this is a violation. Claire feels sick about it, avoids his eyes, and still goes back for more. What The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson never quite does is make her answer for it; the reckoning, when it comes, is brief and is swept aside by larger events.
The love story itself is unhurried and closed door, a matter of shared dinners, an old dog meeting a haughty cat, and a long walk on the sand where Julian says he cannot give her what she deserves yet. That retreat stalls the relationship for a stretch the book cannot really afford. His estranged friend Eddie, who keeps appearing in the stacks, is the more affecting creation, and the less said about him the better.
What Memory Owes to Borrowed Books
The set piece that justifies the whole enterprise is the town meeting. Claire, who has spent the book trying to save the library with clues, ends up leading a march to City Hall with her father’s old crew behind her and handmade signs bobbing overhead. Then the residents stand up one at a time. A grandmother describes the books Grace sent to her daughter’s hospital bed. A lawyer remembers the chair left out for him when he could not afford casebooks. A young woman learned English at children’s story hour. A widow still visits the aisle where she met her husband. It is unashamedly sentimental, and it works, because the novel has spent three hundred pages earning the right to it.
Its opposition is less carefully built. Janet Ritter, chair of the board, clicks through the building in stilettos pricing it like a listing, and she never wavers or explains herself. When the fate of the library is finally settled, the news reaches Claire secondhand, in a late-night burst of gossip, which feels like a strange way to resolve the story the book opened with. Readers should also know that The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson goes to dark places beneath its cosy cover: bereavement, buried trauma, a child’s illness, drink and violence in a family home, and suicidal despair all figure, written with care rather than spectacle.
What It Leaves Behind
What stays is a feeling about public rooms: that the reading chairs and returns trolley of a small-town library hold a community’s history more faithfully than any record office. Anderson’s prose can be repetitive, and her villains are thin, but her affection for librarians and the people who need them is real and specific, and The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson will start conversations in any group that has ever fought for a branch library.
Groups who finish The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson wanting more rooms full of books with something strange at the edges should try Dinner at the Night Library by Hika Harada, a quieter, stranger novel about a private library that opens after dark. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer shares this book’s belief that the stories read in childhood can rescue a grown woman, and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin offers a widowed bookseller on a small island whose shop slowly becomes the heart of its town.
Ask which one has been waiting longest. It is a good rule for shelter dogs, and a better one for libraries.