First published 2024
Evar has never left the library. It is older than any empire still standing, larger than most cities, and it is the only world he knows. Livira has never seen a library. She grew up in a dust-scraped settlement where monsters come out of the open land and survival is the only curriculum. Neither of them has mattered much to the world so far. That is about to change. When their paths begin to converge, looping across time and across worlds, each of them starts pulling at secrets buried deep in the library's impossible architecture. The secrets pull back. Mark Lawrence, author of Prince of Thorns, builds this story around two young people who seem to have nothing in common except that the world forgot them. Blood gets spilled. Cities burn. The pen, it turns out, is not always enough on its own. At the center of all of it is a question about what stories actually are: not the ink, not the paper, not even the language, but something that can travel further than any of those things. This is a book about truth, lies, and the slow erosion of the line between them.
Genres: science-fiction-fantasy, literary-fiction, fantasy, dark-fantasy, epic-fantasy
Vibes: dark, epic, mysterious, philosophical, thought-provoking
Tropes: converging-paths, found-family, secrets-and-revelations, unlikely-heroes
Setting: Library, Settlement
576 pages · Paperback · Ace
Content warnings: death, violence