The Echo of Old Books

In 1984 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Ashlyn Greer runs a rare book shop and has a quiet gift: she can sometimes feel the emotions left behind by a book's previous owners. When two unpublished volumes come into her hands, she finds what appear to be the accounts of a doomed romance between their authors, Hemi and Belle, whose love story begins in New York City in 1941.

Each volume tells its own version of what happened, and the two do not agree. Ashlyn becomes determined to learn the truth and to give the lovers some measure of closure, while her search forces her to look at the unfinished chapters of her own life.

The novel moves between 1984 and the war years, with the two manuscripts working as books within the book. It blends historical fiction and a tragic love story with a touch of the paranormal, and it touches on antisemitism and the sympathy some Americans felt for the Nazis in the early 1940s. It suits readers of dual-timeline historical fiction who like stories built around books, secrets and second chances at closure.