The Book That Held Her Heart - Softcover

Lawrence, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593437985 ISBN 13: 9780593437988

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Two people once connected by a vast and mysterious library are now separated and must overcome time and distance to reunite and bring peace to their worlds, in the final book of the Library Trilogy.

The fate of an infinite library hangs on one book, a book that holds the power to break the unbreakable. In the face of such forces, fragile things like hearts, worlds, and even family seem certain to fail.

The people most vital to Livira are scattered across time and space—lost, divided into factions, in mortal peril. Somehow she must bring them together and resolve the unresolvable argument that fuels the library’s war.

The bond between Livira and Evar has stretched and stretched again. Can it hold at the end, when things fall apart? Can it unite them against impossible odds?

This is the last chapter, the final page. The end threatens and no one—not characters, readers, or even the author—will emerge unscathed.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Lawrence was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to British parents but moved to the UK at the age of one. After earning a PhD in mathematics at Imperial College London, he went back to the US to work on a variety of research projects, including the “Star Wars” missile-defense program. Since returning to the UK, he has worked mainly on image processing and decision/reasoning theory. He never had any ambition to be a writer, so he was very surprised when a half-hearted attempt to find an agent turned into a global publishing deal overnight. His first trilogy, The Broken Empire, has been universally acclaimed as a groundbreaking work of fantasy, and both Emperor of Thorns and The Liar’s Key have won the David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. Mark is married, with four children, and lives in Bristol.

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Chapter 1

Anne

As a baby, Anne had taken her first ever steps among the aisles of what her grandfather called his library but was in fact a second-hand bookshop. It wasn't even his, since his mother, the Hoffman matriarch, was still alive, though you wouldn't know it to look at her. Anne had been told that Great-grandma Ruth was ninety-three, but she had seen, in one of the huge encyclopaedias that had to be lifted down for her, an engraving of an ancient queen embalmed with forgotten skill and preserved against the tide of nearly fifty centuries. Nana Ruth looked every bit as old as the queen amid her wrappings.

In any case, it was within these musty aisles that Anne had taken that first step, and later read her first word, which in retrospect had been a step of more significance, carrying her over an invisible threshold into a world much larger than that occupied by those who rarely choose to exercise their imagination.

As a toddler, and in fact until she was older than she was now prepared to admit, Anne had thought her grandfather's shop to be endless. She had believed that there would always be another corner to turn, another previously unknown aisle to discover, the shelves overfull, spine crowding spine, other books pushed in horizontally to rest atop their more orderly fellows.

She had of course, in the intervening years, discovered the rear wall and traced its entirety, which was unbroken but for a single door leading to a workshop where her father had once been employed repairing any book of sufficient rarity and value to deserve such attention. The shop stretched back much further than a casual visitor might imagine, but it most definitely had its limits. A fact that had simultaneously comforted and disappointed the young Anne, the balance between the two emotions varying across years as she grew older, or even from the morning of one day to the evening of the next.

At sixteen, she watched the shop when her grandfather's other business took him across town. Watching the shop mainly meant watching the door, since once a potential customer had disappeared among the shelves there was no telling where they might be. "Count them in. Count them out." This was her grandfather's instruction, written in a faded hand on yellowing paper pinned behind the till. The shop had to operate on an honour system since there was no way of knowing if someone were spiriting out a book under their jacket. Though if the person emerging from the aisles appeared considerably fatter than the one that entered, this was a pretty clear sign that they should be hoisted by the ankles and shaken until evidence of their crime presented itself.

Sadly, in Anne's view, no shaking took place, and any thefts went largely unnoticed amid the uncatalogued plenty of their stock. Replenishments for the books sold or stolen came largely from house sales where the occupant had died, and their descendants wanted easily divisible cash rather than awkward reminders of the lost relative. In the past, Grandfather had jokingly called himself and the others who converged on such properties "vultures." The unwanted furniture would go to Wagner or Fischer, the carpets and rugs to Hersch or maybe Wolf, and so on. Most often, Grandfather's offer on the books would be the best and he would return with his cart laden, a modest private library sheltering beneath the tarps.

But such joking had long since been abandoned, now that the townsfolk were stirred up against the tribe, and more than ready to throw the word as an allegation rather than the self-deprecating label originally intended. Anne had grown up with dirty looks and name-calling in the school playground. She'd become used to attending the birthdays only of the children who shared her temple. But more recently it would be a stone that was thrown at her rather than merely unpleasant words.

She tried to tell herself that it was because she'd grown into a bigger target, almost a woman now, but the Wagners' children came back from lessons crying or bruised or both often as not. Her grandfather said that evil men sought to use any difference to create fear, distrust, and hatred, all of which they would employ to advance their own position.

Anne had often wondered at the contrast between the way mankind divided its books and the way they divided themselves. For the former, they looked beneath the cover and considered what was written there, finding shelves for histories, for romances, for biographies, and for mysteries. For people, each far more complex than even the most profound of books, the cover often served. They saw her hair, the shape of her face, and they knew exactly how she fitted into their lives, regardless of her character. She was beneath them, unclean, an intruder into the town where her forebears had lived for many generations.


Anne sat at the counter, the mechanical crank-operated cash register hulking in front of her. They didn’t need a register of course. The customers came in twos and threes, or more generally these days in ones, with long, silent gaps in between. But Grandfather had inherited the register from one of his uncles’ shops and installed it with an owner’s pride, insisting that it made the place look modern and busy, even though the device was the best part of fifty years old, and the shop was largely deserted.

Despite the family's business being concerned primarily with old books, their takings run through an ancient register, it was the future that fascinated Anne's grandfather. His favourite topic of conversation was the pace of change. He would list the things that filled Anne's world, and which were wholly absent from his own childhood. It wasn't, he insisted, that he was jealous of the marvels she now had access to, be it mechanical adding machines or lights that burst into life at the flick of a switch, but that he envied her the next fifty years. If technology had delivered so much over the course of his own life and was still accelerating, what wonders were to come?

A familiar but unexpected noise startled Anne from her thoughts, tumbling the neglected book in her hands to the dusty floorboards. She stood up sharply from her stool. She'd been on edge lately-well, more than lately-her nerves tight-strung. A glance at the windows showed a gloomy, rainswept street, empty save for a lone figure in a raincoat, bent against the wind, quickly gone from view. The board that covered the hole from last week's half-brick rattled in the wind. The cracks spread beyond the board, catching whatever light escaped the clouds, glimmering, letting her know that the violence couldn't just be covered up, promising more.

Anne tore her eyes from the street. The noise had come from back among the aisles. It had been the sound of a book hitting the ground, much like the sound her own book had made a few seconds later. Count them in-count them out. She had done just that and knew herself to be alone. But still a book had fallen.

"Hello?" Her voice sounded small. She coughed and tried again. "Hello!"

Nothing. Just the peculiar silence of books. Fresh rain suddenly pattered against the window, spattering the legend Hoffman's Books, the painted letters offered to her in reverse. It seemed too dark for barely after noon, even for November. The electric lights struggled to fill the space. Two bulbs had blown earlier in the month, filling some of the aisles with sharply drawn shadows.

Another soft noise from the rear of the shop. Not a book falling, not this time. The scuff of a shoe perhaps? Anne lifted the divider and came out from behind the desk. She'd asked her grandfather why the shelves weren't arranged in long straight lines. A brief walk across the storefront would reveal any intruder were that the case. Instead, the arrangement was closer to labyrinth than linear.

"Mystery!"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593437985
• ISBN 13: 9780593437988
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 385
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Bear Family Records GmbH; 49474882160; info@bear-family.de; ; Grenzweg 1; Holste; 27729; Deutschland