The Keeper of Aldersham

Cordelia inherits a library. The library hires her back.

Cordelia Ashfield came to Aldersham in November to bury an aunt and inherit a library. She did not expect the library to be alive. She did not expect the cat to be working. And she certainly did not expect a man to climb out of a book on her third night, polite and barefoot and apparently real.

Aunt Hetty has left her something more than a house. She has left a working practice: a Keeper’s hands, a kettle’s discipline, a notebook in a margin-hand, and the slow and necessary art of helping a character find their way home. The library has been doing this for a hundred and seven years. Cordelia has nine days to learn before the first one arrives.

Outside the lane, a cult that has tried to break into Aldersham five times in two centuries is preparing to try again. They believe books are siphons. Cordelia is going to discover, the careful way, that books are something else.

Things That Walk Out of Books is the first volume of The Keeper of Aldersham, a cozy fantasy with real stakes. For listeners of Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver, and A. J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten.

The Keeper of Aldersham, Book One. A five-book series. Standalone arc at Book One.