The Architecture of Tranquillity

The hygrometer read fifty-four per cent, and Layla Noor had been staring at it for long enough to know it was lying. Four hundred and eleven volumes are dying in a boarded-up library in south Manchester, and Layla has until December to prove they are worth saving. She is very good at this. She is extremely good at not needing anything. Then a landscape architect arrives to survey the grounds for the developer who wants the site, and Zayd Rahman turns out to be the only other person in Manchester who can read a building the way she reads a book - and who understands that the courtyard, the ruined water channel, the basin nobody has looked at since 1979, are not decoration.
They are evidence. Inside a nineteenth-century binding, Layla finds a deed. It has three seals, a prohibition written by a man who had watched it happen to somebody else, and a hundred and seventeen years of one woman's handwriting running down the back of it. Zaynab al-Halabi has been waiting a long time for someone to turn the page over. The Architecture of Tranquility is a novel about conservation and repair - of buildings, of endowments, of two people who have each spent a decade being fine.