The Book That Wouldn’t Burn (The Library Trilogy, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

She knew that, like many of the others who had cried for their parents until they were too dry for tears, she should be weeping over the loss of her aunt, and all the other adults who had been kind to her. Livira could feel that loss like a pit in her chest, but she had put it in a box of her own making. She planned to open it when she could do something about it.

An old woman in black elbowed past Livira in the throng, spitting at her as she went. No anger in it, the casual hostility the more shocking for that fact.

We humans are herd animals. When several gather to browse in one spot, more will come. Few places offer more eloquent testimony to this fact than does a library, wherein our focus ensures some few books scarcely touch the shelves from the moment of their binding until the day they fall apart from overuse. Whilst all around, in sullen silence, the unloved show their spines in endless rows, aching for the touch that never comes.

“One thing’s for sure, I’m not in kansas anymore.” It was a phrase in half the languages he knew and one that had led to a saying almost as ancient: “We don’t even know what kansas is anymore.” Mayland said that in the histories some held it to be a real place, some a mythical city, and others still an enlightened state of being. Evar leaned towards agreeing with those who thought it was a state.

“He said a story is a net. It can capture something as large as the spirit of the age or as small as the emotion of a man watching the last leaf fall from a tree, or sometimes both, and make one a reflection of the other.”

It unsettled her how the same words could mean such different things to different people. How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.

idiot. I’m pleased to see you!” “No accounting for taste.” Malar shrugged and looked at Meelan. “And this would be Sirrar Meelan. I’m to escort you two to Yute’s place, on account of how murdery things tend to get every time Livira leaves the library.” “Once!” Livira protested. “OK, twice, but it was on the same day.”