The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson

With the emotional resonance of How to Read a Book and the magical edge of The Lost Bookshop comes a stunning ode to community following one librarian who discovers a mysterious room with shelves of her patron's unfinished memories, and the one memory that might save both herself, and her library, from disappearing forever.

In the New England coastal town of Foxhollow Bay, librarian Claire Ashford lives quietly tucked away in the centuries old library where she works, keeping all things, herself included, in order. But when the town threatens to shut down the library, Claire is bereft to know her safe haven will be no more. That's when, while wandering the shelves after hours, she finds a door that shouldn't exist, and behind it, a room filled with books that no one else can see.

Every book she opens pulls her into someone else’s memory. Unfinished stories and snippets of lives that have passed through the library long before her. And when she opens a book showing her a bridge with a figure standing in the center, the memory refuses to let go, calling to her in a way that she cannot explain. And when she meets Julian Thomas, a patron who sketches the same bridge she’s been seeing, she realizes their lives may be tangled in ways neither of them fully understands.

With time running out and the library on the brink of being demolished, Claire must confront what she’s spent years trying to erase, the memory she has locked away that is fighting to get out, before the truth and the library itself are gone forever.