The Library of Leaving: A Novel

In the wake of the Great War, American Helen Fox lives a solitary life in Switzerland as a librarian, cataloguing books left as bequests by diplomats and other expatriates. Bookish and buttoned up, Helen is shocked when she receives a package that hints at her far more colorful past: it’s a draft chapter of a novel written by a man she knew intimately during the war—a soldier she nursed at a camp in the Alps for wounded Allied troops. Though he claims his book is fiction, Helen is afraid of what it might reveal about who she used to be, really, and whose side she might have been on. . . .

Bursting with literary references and testament to the power of reading, this lush and atmospheric tale of love, grief, and betrayal interweaves Helen’s own recollections of her life—including her affair with an exiled Austrian baron—with pages from her ex-lover’s supposedly fictional book and other dispatches. The Library of Leaving is both a story of a wartime romance and a meditation on how books read or written tell—and sometimes distort—the truth of a life.