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

by Mark Lawrence

The Mechanism’s pull was that while a reader’s imagination could animate a book inside their head, the Mechanism would build that world around you. It offered the contents of each book as something to be physically experienced, walked through, partaken in, interrogated, shared. You could immerse yourself in the book in whatever way you might desire. Over the centuries that Evar’s people had been trapped within the chamber the Mechanism had been their escape. Every generation or so someone who went in didn’t come out again. And even though on each of the five occasions on which such a tragedy had occurred, the victim had been a child of maybe eight or nine years, it seemed that the draw of the Mechanism was such that this was considered a price worth paying.