THE PAPER HOUSE

On a spring day in 1998, literature professor Bluma Lennon buys a used copy of Emily Dickinson’s poems from a Soho bookshop. Moments after she starts reading it, she’s struck by a car on a street corner and killed. After her funeral, one of her colleagues—the book’s narrator—receives a package addressed to Bluma: a broken-spined old copy of Conrad’s The Shadow-Line, inscribed with her own dedication. Intrigued, he sets off on a quest that leads him to Buenos Aires, searching for clues about Carlos Brauer, a devoted book collector, and his mysterious connection to Bluma.

Already a worldwide classic in its genre, The Paper House is a venture beyond our shadow lines, and what we fear to leave behind to cross them.

Excerpt:
It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us. […] Nobody wants to mislay a book. We prefer to lose a ring, a watch, our umbrella, rather than a book whose pages we will never read again, but which retains, just in the sound of its title, a remote and perhaps long-lost emotion.