Review: 25 Library Terrace by Natalie Fergie
Kelly Lacey
I fell head-over-heels for 25 Library Terrace. From the first chapter I had that giddy, bookish flutter — the feeling you get when a writer has you by the hand and you’re quite happy to be led anywhere. Set in Edinburgh (my patch), it thrums with the kind of lived-in detail that made me pause, smile, and think, aye, I know that. The house itself isn’t just a backdrop; it’s a pulse — stone, weather, rooms and wee moments — all stitched through a century of women’s lives.
Fergie frames the novel around Scotland’s census years, and it’s a brilliant conceit. We step into 1911 with Ursula Black and the suffrage movement, feel the tug of idealism and duty; we glimpse 1931, when the house becomes a testing ground for a new way of living; then forward to 2011, where Tess Dutton, bruised by love, finds both a spare room and an unexpectedly singular landlady; and finally to 2022, when post-pandemic threads draw tight and the house’s generations knit together. It’s elegant, humane storytelling — the sort that trusts the reader to notice echoes: names recurring, objects migrating, choices rippling outward across time.
What I loved most is how ordinary lives are treated as extraordinary — not with melodrama, but with warmth and curiosity. There’s activism, domesticity, friendship, grief, second chances; secrets surface, but it’s the relationships that stay with you. You get that Mary Paulson-Ellis vibe — an Edinburgh tale of houses, histories and hidden links — yet Fergie’s voice is distinctly her own: precise, tender, and quietly funny in the right places. If your book club loves stories where place is character and small choices matter, pop this on the list.
Because I listened on audio as well as reading, a wee note on the audiobook: Lesley Harcourt is pitch-perfect. Her delivery is fluid and empathetic, and there’s an authenticity to the accent work that only deepens the sense of place — no jarring notes, just a narrator who lets the prose breathe. It’s an 11h 49m listen and released in late July 2025; I found it added texture without ever showboating. If you’re Edinburgh-based (or just Edinburgh-smitten), it’s a joy to hear these lives unfold in a voice that fits.
Living here amplified the experience for me. I kept thinking about the way a single front door can hold decades of comings and goings — how a house remembers who we’ve been and gently nudges who we’ll become. By the end I had that lovely, bittersweet ache: satisfied, but not quite ready to leave. Books like this are why I read — and why I’ll always glance up at an old Edinburgh house and wonder who once sat by the window, looking out at me.
In short: generous, layered, beautifully Edinburgh. I adored it.
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