The Book That broke The World

 By: Mark Lawrence  

Location: FIC LAW

Genre: Epic Fantasy

Series: #2  The Library Trilogy

The Library Trilogy is about many things: adventure, discovery, and romance, but it's also a love letter to books and the places where they live. 

The focus is on one vast and timeless library, but the love expands to encompass smaller more personal collections, and bookshops of all shades too.

The second volume in the bestselling, ground-breaking Library Trilogy, following THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T BURN.

We fight for the people we love. We fight for the ideas we want to be true.
Evar and Livira stand side by side and yet far beyond each other's reach. Evar is forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover her book if she's to return to her life. While Evar's journey leads him outside into the vastness of a world he's never seen, Livira's destination lies deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.

And all the while, the library quietly weaves thread to thread, bringing the scattered elements of Livira's old life – friends and foe alike – back together beneath new skies.

Long ago, a lie was told, and with the passing years it has grown and spread, a small push leading to a chain of desperate consequences. Now, as one edifice topples into the next with ever-growing violence, it threatens to break the world. 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.

REVIEW BY ADAM

Stunning, heartbreaking, and powerful. Vastly different from book one and all the better for it.

A brilliant follow-up to The Book That Wouldn't Burn, Lawrence takes a sharp turn with this sequel, providing the reader with a much narrower focus on fewer characters and plot threads while answering many questions raised throughout the series thus far. While new interesting characters and timelines eat up many chapters of the story, they are welcome and help bind together many of the open mysteries of the previous entry.

What surprised me most was how little of the story took place within the Library itself. Much world-building along different paths of the timeline helped establish structure before the final act's devastating sequence of events and revelations that twisted my brain in fun and exciting ways. It's a wonder to think that Mark writes these stories without much of a plan, and it somehow all ties together in a sensical and elevated fashion.

This trilogy is about the power of books, the history of words, the meaning of letters, and communications throughout space and time. So many themes are covered that it's almost hard to keep up, but the pages keep turning and the wonders never cease. It is a thrilling journey, and quite possibly Mark's most meaningful, most powerful work yet.