Between Memory and Oblivion: A Novel

Peter Briscoe’s Between Memory and Oblivion follows Michael Ashe, an antiquarian bookseller navigating the shifting landscape of book collecting in an era increasingly dominated by digital technology. After losing his best library client, Michael embarks on a journey through Paris and Mexico, hunting rare volumes and negotiating with librarians, most notably Elizabeth Wyatt, whose embrace of digitization puts her at odds with his reverence for the physical book. His struggle to save printed books takes a unique turn when he uncovers the extraordinary story of Gabriel Naudé—the most learned man in France and the visionary architect of a legendary library built to safeguard knowledge from the relentless decay of time. This discovery transforms Michael’s quest from a personal struggle for survival into a passionate, public crusade to rescue the very soul of books from oblivion. Alongside professional struggles, Michael’s quest for love leads to a passionate yet contentious romance with Elizabeth. At the same time, Michael’s protest against a university’s plan to digitize and dismember a collection he painstakingly assembled, becomes a climatic point in the narrative. Can he succeed in his fight to save books and to find genuine love?

Between Memory and Oblivion takes you to California, Paris, and Mexico, but its true landscape is the world of libraries, rare books, and the collectors and scholars who cherish them. Briscoe populates this world with richly drawn characters: Michael, haunted by loneliness yet driven by passion; María, his quick-witted assistant who finds her own awakening through books; George, the scholar-librarian; and Elizabeth, the ambitious digital resources librarian. Thematically, the novel explores the tension between preservation and progress, memory and forgetting, analog and digital. Briscoe’s narrative honors the tactile, serendipitous, and human aspects of book culture, contrasting them with the antiseptic efficiency of digitization. Through Michael’s battles—both internal and external—the novel asks whether the soul of a library, or a life, can survive if reduced to mere data, and whether the pursuit of perfection is itself a form of loss. I loved the gorgeous, exquisite prose, the elaborately developed characters, and the conflict that hits home powerfully, but it was what this book made me feel about printed books that makes it a must-read.