Library of Souls - Book 1

In November 1989, in York, Pennsylvania, the librarian's hands have begun to shake.

Margaret Callahan has spent thirty-five years tending the public library on Market Street - a stone building constructed in 1855 by the family she married into, with an east wall built double-thick and a basement floor that grades toward the creek. She knows every book on every shelf. She knows the building's sounds the way a fisherman knows the sky. And she knows the small pencil dot her predecessors taught her to make in the fourth column of certain lending cards: a mark with no heading, a record the Dewey Decimal system cannot file.

For thirty-two years, Margaret has been doing what Adelaide Marsh did in 1856 and Clara Whitman did after her - unlocking the back door after closing, sheltering the women who arrive in too-large shoes with bruises three days old, marking each one with a single dot.

Now Margaret is fifty-eight. Her hand cannot make the dot. Her husband Frank - the boy who once climbed sixty-seven steps from a cave to a locked door beneath the library - makes her tea every morning. The tea has a metallic brightness she has stopped naming.

Across two timelines, from a Depression-era fountain where two girls met across the spray to a kitchen where a plate breaks against a doorframe, Library of Souls is the story of a building that has been holding what cannot be spoken aloud, and the woman who is losing the words she most needs to keep.