Books like The missing ink by Philip Hensher

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

A devoted dog reflects on life, love, and racing while watching his owner, a race car driver, navigate family trials and professional ambition.

Irene, a spy for the secretive Invisible Library, and her assistant Kai race through an alternate London to recover a stolen book that threatens the fabric of reality.

Laurent Groff explores a 24‑year marriage through two perspectives, revealing that secrets, not always truths, can sustain intimacy and ultimately test the limits of partnership.

Monsieur Perdu, a literary apothecary aboard a Seine barge, prescribes novels to heal broken hearts. When his own love remains a mystery, he journeys south of France to find closure and prove stories can mend souls.

A disorienting journey through memory and identity as a Nebraska truck driver with Capgras Syndrome confronts a sister who may be an impostor, while a cognitive neurologist probes the blurred line between reality and perception.

"Why does writing exist? What does it mean to those who write? Born from the interplay of natural and cultural history, the seemingly magical act of writing has continually expanded our consciousness. Portrayed in mythology as either a gift from heroes or a curse from the gods, it has been used as both an instrument of power and a channel of the divine; a means of social bonding and of individual self-definition. Now, as the revolution once wrought by the printed word gives way to the digital age, many fear that the art of writing, and the nuanced thinking nurtured by writing, are under threat. But writing itself, despite striving for permanence, is always in the midst of growth and transfiguration."--From the publisher.

"Computers, now the writer's tool of choice, are still blamed by skeptics for a variety of ills, from speeding writing up to the point of recklessness, to complicating or trivializing the writing process, to destroying the English language itself. A Better Pencil puts our complex, still-evolving hate-love relationship with computers and the internet into perspective, describing how the digital revolution influences our reading and writing practices, and how the latest technologies differ from what came before. The book explores our use of computers as writing tools in light of the history of communication technology, a history of how we love, fear, and actually use our writing technologies - not just computers, but also typewriters, pencils, and clay tablets. Dennis Baron shows that virtually all writing implements - and even writing itself - were greeted at first with anxiety and outrage: the printing press disrupted the "almost spiritual connection" between the writer and the page; the typewriter was "impersonal and noisy" and would "destroy the art of handwriting." Both pencils and computers were created for tasks that had nothing to do with writing. Pencils, crafted by woodworkers for marking up their boards, were quickly repurposed by writers and artists. The computer crunched numbers, not words, until writers saw it as the next writing machine. Baron also explores the new genres that the computer has launched: email, the instant message, the web page, the blog, social-networking pages like MySpace and Facebook, and communally-generated texts like Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary, not to mention YouTube. Here then is a fascinating history of our tangled dealings with a wide range of writing instruments, from ancient papyrus to the modern laptop ..."--Jacket.

Study of the history and methods of decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics and the cuneiform writing of a number of scripts and languages of the ancient world.

After his mother dies, 12‑year‑old David escapes into the stories that once comforted him, only for myth and war to collide in a world where a Crooked Man and a faded king rule over wolves and hidden secrets.