Book of the Week July 23, 2026
Librarian Claire Ashford is an insomniac, but at least now she has good reason. The rumors are true. Her library, in the town of Foxhollow on the Massachusetts coast, is being redeveloped, the “distant men who [speak] in numbers and profit margins” having more sway than Claire and the townspeople who use the space so lovingly. Besides the world’s most overstepping and boisterous colleague, Grace, Claire has one source of hope: a strange door in the library, which appears only sometimes, leads to a room with books that seem to want to help her. Opening any of the strangely titled volumes reveals a memory of something that happened in the library or the town. If Claire can piece together the stories, can she find a way to save Foxhollow library? Finding out is an engrossing and lovely quest for the reader, one that involves Claire facing real troubles but finding support and perhaps romance along the way. A bonus for librarians: our work and its obstacles are portrayed realistically, except of course for the magical door. Those who enjoy small-town tales and books set in libraries, such as Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library (a Foxhollow patron pick!) or Haruki Muraki’s much more bizarre The Strange Library, will be right at home here.—Henrietta Thornton