Late Returns

About this book

Nora Bexley has run the Birchwell Public Library in northern Vermont for eleven years. She knows every squeaking floorboard, every regular by name, and every trick for stretching a budget that shrinks a little more each town meeting. What she does not know is what to do with Eli Marsh, the quiet structural engineer who walks in one October morning with a single library book that was due back in the previous century. Eli has come home to empty his late mother's house and sell it. In the hallway he found a box of eleven library books, all filled with his mother's pencil handwriting in the margins. He could return the whole box at once. Instead he returns them one at a time, because one at a time gives him a reason to come back. Nora starts reading the margins, then starts answering them. But the house will not stay unsold forever, a firm in Chicago is holding a job open for Eli, and the library itself is one town vote away from losing its funding. A warm, witty, slow burning love story about grief, second chances, marginalia, and the quiet courage it takes to stay.