订书匠 – The Binding by Bridget Collins

当记忆被装订成一本书，失去记忆的人便能够得到幸福吗？

刚刚成为订书匠学徒的艾米特，因过人的天赋，迅速掌握了一项特殊的装订术：装订记忆。无论是人们无法承受的黑暗记忆，还是不可告人的秘密，抑或是令人陶醉的美好回忆，艾米特都可以轻易地将它们封存到书中。而受装订者，将永远遗忘这段记忆。

一天，艾米特像往常一样，将装订好的书放进藏书室。长久以来的好奇突破了对禁令的畏惧，驱使他走向禁止进入的藏书室深处。在这里，成百上千本“记忆”在书架上整齐地排列着。直到他不经意地看到一本名为《艾米特·法默》的书……

Books are dangerous things in Collins’s alternate universe, a place vaguely reminiscent of 19th-century England. It’s a world in which people visit book binders to rid themselves of painful or treacherous memories. Once their stories have been told and are bound between the pages of a book, the slate is wiped clean and their memories lose the power to hurt or haunt them.

After having suffered some sort of mental collapse and no longer able to keep up with his farm chores, Emmett Farmer is sent to the workshop of one such binder to live and work as her apprentice. Leaving behind home and family, Emmett slowly regains his health while learning the binding trade. He is forbidden to enter the locked room where books are stored, so he spends many months marbling end pages, tooling leather book covers, and gilding edges. But his curiosity is piqued by the people who come and go from the inner sanctum, and the arrival of the lordly Lucian Darnay, with whom he senses a connection, changes everything.

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