The Binding: The most captivating novel of 2019

Because of the colours. Because the drab wintry world is so bright I can hardly bear it. Because the pain is closer and the taste of soot in my mouth is as solid as any food I’ve ever eaten. Because I can smell roots and things asleep and seeds waiting to grow.

All I want is to find a shadow somewhere and dissolve into it.

‘He thinks I’m a crotchet-monger. A stubborn, backward old stick-in-the-mud. Because I think the craft is sacred. He laughs at that. It’s all about power, for him. Money. He has no … reverence.

How many people are walking around with half their lives missing, oblivious?

It had been the other way round, so many times – that she’d watched at my bedside while I slept, as patient as stone – but she’d never made me feel as though I should be grateful. For the first time I wondered whether her brusqueness had been deliberate.

There was a young man sitting with his back to me. It was Lucian Darnay.

‘I don’t sell books. I keep them safe.

it seemed lazy – unkind, even – to let her lie here in this icy stillness. I wanted her to have the dancing light and the whisper of the flames to keep her company … But what fool would heat a room with a corpse in it? And I could imagine de Havilland’s face when he saw me climbing the stairs with a basket of logs. I turned away. There was no point

For a split second colour dances on the edge of my vision, a sense of light and space as if someone has lifted the lid of a box.