This month I’m recommending a challenging novel by Mark Lawrence, an author who was born in America but now lives in England. The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was published in 2023 as the first volume in The Library Trilogy. It is readily available in paperback, ebook or audio formats and was followed by The Book That Broke The World (2024) and The Book That Held Her Heart (2025). There is also a collection of short stories related to The Library Trilogy which is called Missing Pages (2025). These books contain some elements usually associated with Science Fiction, such as Time Travel, space-stations, post-apocalypse landscapes and androids, but the publishers classify The Library Trilogy as Epic Fantasy, so I’ll go with that. The influence of some classic Fantasy authors, such as C.S.Lewis, is obvious from the first volume onwards.

The Library Trilogy does things that only novels can do and plays with the imaginations and instincts of its readers. This is not a story that would work as a film and there are some major plot twists which must not be given away by any reviewer. So, my synopsis will introduce the setting and characters without saying too much about the plot. The ancient Library of the title exists in many different worlds and contains a vast collection of the knowledge and creativity of numerous species from all eras. Its huge chambers are sealed off by tall doors, each of which can only be opened by a member of a particular race or species. The Library is staffed by gleaming metallic beings who rarely speak known as Soldiers or Assistants and there are three elusive Guardians who take the forms of a cat, a dog and a raven. Some believe that the Library is the cause of an eternal war between two gods, Irad, the creator of the Library, and his brother, Jaspeth, who wants to destroy it.

In The Book That Wouldn’t Burn the story is centred on two main characters, Evar and Livira. For as long as he can remember, Evar has been trapped in a chamber of the Library along with four others who escaped the brutal sabbers who massacred their families by hiding in a mysterious building known as the Mechanism. Those who enter the Mechanism can immerse themselves completely in the world of a book, a process which can last many years. Evar’s three quarrelsome adoptive brothers, Mayland, Kerrol and Starval and his spirited sister, Clovis, all came out of the Mechanism with different skills. Starval, for example, is a trained assassin and Clovis has beome a formidable warrior. Gentle Evar can’t fully recall what happened to him in the Mechanism but he believes that he met a remarkable woman there and very much wants to find her again. When dominating Mayland disappears, Evar is uncertain whether one of the siblings has murdered him or whether he has been killed by the Escapes – terrifying creatures that sometimes emerge from the Mechanism. Things only change when Evar finds a book which seems to contain a personal message for him.

Livira is a young girl named after a weed that can flourish on even the most barren ground. She lives with her aunt in a poor village out in the desolate wasteland known as the Dust, with only a distant view of the great City that contains an entrance to the Library. One day her village is attacked by a band of sabber raiders who kill most of the adults and carry off the children to become slaves. After a while Livira and some of the other children are rescued by a patrol from the City. One of the soldiers is impressed by Livira’s courage and intelligence so when they reach the City he makes sure that she is given a chance to apply to become a trainee Librarian. The tyrannical ruler of the City despises Dusters but Livira proves to have a rare gift for languages and is taken under the wing of eccentric Deputy Librarian Yute.

Livira is soon a star student and makes friends with some of her fellow trainees, such as vivacious Carlotte and reserved Arpix. The kindly Yute, his generous cook, Salamonda, and his unusually large cat, Wentworth, become a second family to Livira. One of the tasks of a trainee Librarian is to find and fetch books, a process that can take many days and is not without danger. Some Librarians, including Yute’s daughter, have never returned from the depths of the Library and are presumed dead. This does not deter Livira who gets ever more adventurous and makes secret trips into the Library. She is also inspired to write her own stories on pages that she hides in books all over the Library, an action that will have unexpected and dramatic consequences. Equally momentous is Livira’s discovery of a part of the Library known as The Exchange which contains entrances to numerous different worlds and eras.

In the Exchange, Livira meets a young man called Evar who seems like a romantic character from one of her own stories. It is the start of an epic journey that will take them to alternate worlds and back and forwards in time. They each encounter new species, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Livira and Evar become attracted to each other inspite of major obstacles to their relationship but dark times are coming. Their City is facing invasion and Evar and his family and Livira and her friends will soon be forced to take sides in the war to decide whether the Library should continue to exist. Will everything end in ashes and dust as so many civilizations have before, or is there hope for the future?

Lawrence has dedicated his trilogy To libraries, bookshops and everyone who works in them. Some may assume that any story primarily set in a library can’t have a very exciting plot but that would be completely untrue. All kinds of astonishing, terrifying and horrific things happen in Lawrence’s Library and adjacent worlds. There are gruesome episodes which verge on Horror but I would classify the trilogy as an uplifting Dark Fantasy. It also contains several remarkable stories of love breaking down boundaries. On Fantasy Reads I have picked a number of enjoyable novels set in bookshops or libraries, such as The Silver Bough (October 2014), The Library of the Unwritten (November 2021) and The Cat Who Saved Books (April 2022). These have described places I would love to visit but that isn’t the case with The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. The Library – with its resident rat-spiders, imprisoning locked rooms, unstable towers of books and lurking insectoid monsters – is much too scary even for a passionate reader like me.

Evar’s upbringing in the Library is not pictured as idyllic. The closest thing he has had to parents were an Assistant and a Soldier, who are generally artificial beings with little use for emotions. Evar had plenty to read but only leather bindings to make clothes out of. A pool in the centre of the two mile square chamber he was trapped in provided a bare minimum of nourishment. In the third volume, when Evar eats at an inn with one of his siblings, it is a shock to realize that this is the first good meal he has had in his entire life. When Evar is desperate enough to dive into the pool, he wins through to the Exchange and a sudden vast range of possibilities.

Evar perceives the Exchange as a quiet forest full of pools that are the entrances to other worlds and times. Readers of C.S.Lewis’s Narnia books will immediately notice a strong similarity to the Wood Between the Worlds which features in The Magician’s Nephew (1955). Other details from this wonderful book are scattered across the trilogy, along with semi-disguised references to many other literary works, particularly in the quotations used to head each chapter. Livira is unusual amongst her generation of Librarians in believing that fiction is a vital part of a civilization’s heritage, a view obviously shared by her creator.

The Exchange is a place where people from different eras can encounter each other but it has distinctive rules about Time Travel. If someone travels into the past, they enter it as a kind of ghost, invisible and inaudible to most of the inhabitants of that era. The furthest forward in time that somebody goes becomes their present. This leads to all manner of complications in the plot and startling revelations about the original identities and motivations of some of the characters. Members of Evar’s family and Livira’s circle of friends are thrown together in dangerous places and times so that odd couple Clovis and Arpix find themselves sharing a leadership role and Carlotte makes a very unusual marriage. I often felt that I needed diagrams to help get the time-leaps straight in my head but I had become invested enough in Lawrence’s characters (especially Livira) to follow them anywhere.

A consistent piece of advice in the trilogy is Don’t Listen to Ghosts (travellers from the future) but like all good advice this is often ignored. People who are the victims of oppression or trapped in hopeless situations allow themselves to be manipulated by ghostly voices and the results can be heartbreakingly sad. It is easy to make a comparison with our own times and the damaging effects of pseudonymous voices of hate on the Internet. This isn’t the only way in which Lawrence’s eternal and infinite Library resembles the Internet. Both contain a huge body of accumulated knowledge and opinions, some of which can be extremely harmful. Issues around censorship are explored in the trilogy (including an excursion into the book-burning era of Nazi Germany) and Lawrence allows some of his characters to make a surprisingly strong case for the destruction of the Library. They argue that easy access to so much knowledge prevents new generations from developing thinking skills and being able to work out problems for themselves. The Library also contains enough technical information to make wars ever more lethal, leading to the complete destruction of some species and civilizations. Wise and compassionate Yute is the voice of compromise, always trying to bring opponents closer together, but even he can’t prevent some of his decisions costing innocent lives.

The Library Trilogy is also topical in its handling of racism; a destructive mindset that is woven into the narrative in unexpected ways. The Library’s form of positive discrimination (doors keyed to particular species) is meant to foster co-operation but it doesn’t seem to be working. Over a great span of time we are shown appalling examples of minorities being persecuted for cultural differences and imaginary crimes and whole races being exploited, enslaved or simply wiped out. What Lawrence’s characters learn from their time-travels is that no one race is always the oppressor or always the victim. Terrible things have been done by every group we encounter in the trilogy but that never justifies demonizing a whole race. In the third volume, we are also shown that in different circumstances villains can become heroes and vice versa. Lawrence has created a grim fictional universe but he seems to believe that positive change can happen when individuals overcome their differences to come together in love or friendship. I hope that he’s right. Until next month…

Geraldine

June 2025