The Necrology Office at Harrowgate

About this book

Three years ago, Delia Marsh was expelled from Harrowgate University for plagiarism. Now the fog-eaten institution has offered her a strange reprieve: the Necrology Fellowship, a post in the library basement where pre-written obituaries for every living faculty member are drafted, revised, and filed while their subjects are still breathing. Delia's work is to interview aging professors, archive their letters, and quietly decide what will survive them. Then Professor Emeritus Aurelia Vance — celebrated medievalist, dying slowly of leukemia, and one of the committee members who once expelled her — summons Delia with a demand no one has ever made before: write my obituary honestly, sins included. In a university built on polished reputations, the truth may be the most dangerous manuscript in the building.