Don’t judge a book by its cover

With its quartos, rectos and folio, the language of book-binding lends itself to the novelist’s palette. It’s a terminology rich in tactile pleasures and potential metaphor for a writer. So it’s a joy to find Belinda Starling doing it justice in The Journal of Dora Damage, not least by situating this idiosyncratic profession in the equally emotive world of Victorian London.

In a clammy corner of Lambeth in 1859, within earshot of the clattering rails of the Necropolis Railway, Dora Damage struggles to keep her family out of the workhouse. Her husband Peter, proprietor of Damage’s Bookbinders, has succumbed to crippling arthritis, leaving Dora and their epileptic five-year-old daughter at the mercy of loan sharks and local gossip. Dora is a modern woman, more in tune with bibliophilic concerns than the call of scuttles and sheets, which only serves to enrage her husband whose humour and sensitivity has become as gnarled as his hands.