Mark Lawrence

Two people living in a world connected by an immense and mysterious library must fight for those they love in the second book in a new trilogy from the international bestselling author of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. The Library spans worlds and times. It touches and joins distant places. It is memory and future. And amid its vastness Evar Eventari both found, and lost, Livira Page. Evar has been forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover the book she wrote—one which is the only true threat to the library’s existence—if she's to return to her life. While Evar's journey leads him outside into a world he's never seen, Livira's path will taker her deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written. The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.

The Book That Broke the World

Laura Dobie

Fairness is something others try to impose at the surface level once they've fixed all the foundations in their favour.

‘Cylinder change, on the hour, every third hour,' Redmak said. 'At least in high season. That's as fast as the cylinders recharge. The masters grumble and groan of course, and fight for the supply, but the ground gives us what the ground gives us, and if they keep breeding their children will have to find another way to light up the night.'

“Cats seem to like a mystery more than a straightforward offer.”

Livira had wanted to explore what it really meant to be trapped and what it really meant to be rescued. The prison could be anything: a library chamber, a well in the Dust from which you couldn't stray, or just a life that -however luxurious - had made you its captive, struck away the legs of your independence one after the other. She had wanted to examine the role of the rescuer and the rescuee. Neither was easy. Sometimes one was hard to tell from the other. Sometimes the knight's armour was their own iron tower from which a rescue was also required.

‘Did you ever meet someone clever who was truly happy?’

The urge to record was nearly as old as memory itself. What was life if not a song sung to the music of the past for the future to hear?

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