First published 2024
Evar has spent his whole life inside the library. Now he is running from it, driven out by an enemy he cannot stop, into a vast world he has never once seen. Livira is trapped somewhere worse: a ghost world, cut off from her life, her book stolen and her way back closed. To return, she has to go deeper into her own writing and fight the stories she put there. They are on opposite sides of an impossible distance, and the library keeps moving pieces around them. Old friends and old enemies are converging under new skies, pulled together by forces neither Evar nor Livira controls. Meanwhile a lie told long ago has been growing quietly for years. It has reached the point where one thing falling knocks the next, and the next, and the damage is no longer small. This is the second book in Mark Lawrence's Library Trilogy, following The Book That Wouldn't Burn. At its center is a war fought over what the library is and what it protects. Evar and Livira each carry a piece of the answer. The cost of being wrong is the world itself.
Genres: science-fiction-fantasy, adventure, fantasy, dark-fantasy, epic-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, epic, immersive, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: chosen-one, found-family, hidden-truth, race-against-time, separated-lovers
Setting: The Library
367 pages · Paperback · Voyager GB
Content warnings: death, violence