A skewering of antihero tropes wrapped in a lush magical setting. For readers of inventive, maximalist fantasy in the vein of Robert Jackson Bennett, Josiah Bancroft, and T. Kingfisher.
THE BOTTOM OF THE LIBRARY
by Charlotte Idyllwild
Del Rey, Publication TBD
(via Liza Dawson Associates)
A historical fantasy set in a patriarchal, reality-warping magical library, following a brooding scholar who obsessively trails the mysterious adversary tampering with his books—and the tamperer herself, who might just be the hero of the story.
In an alternate 1746, the Russian empire is aggressively expanding, powered by the magics birthed in its reality-bending, subterranean Library. Nobody has seen the bottom—and if you venture too deep, you return warped, transformed, or not at all. To outsiders, the Library is horrifying. To Ivan, the Library is home. Ivan is the surly, brilliant son of the Library’s Provost—a nearly friendless outcast, selfish, prideful, insatiably curious. When a grove of trees appears in the depths of level twenty-three, he decides it’s too beautiful to banish right away. But when he discovers that a mysterious reader has been studying his book on the grove, on his personal desk, he becomes obsessed with discovering who it is. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game between Ivan and the most unlikely adversary he can imagine: a woman. He’ll chase her over edges, through mirrors, around herds of walnuts and the Procession of Cutlery, and across his own (tenuous) moral boundaries. Because Ivan isn’t the hero of this story—he’s the villain.
Charlotte Idyllwild is an engineer by profession and writer by passion. Other publications of hers include technical papers in industry journals, which typically involve more equations and fewer enchantments. She lives in California with her husband, two children, a player piano that is definitely not haunted, three cats, a dog, and whatever other creatures have managed to sneak in on any given day.
The top students at Valeran Academy should be in jail. Instead, they were offered a way out: enroll and pledge themselves to the nation. In their alternate future where the Cold War still rages, America needs patriots—don’t call them spies.