National Library Week 2023

"In post World War I England, a young woman inherits a mysterious library and must untangle its powerful secrets . . . With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she's descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her...

When the widely disliked chair of the library board of trustees and a local professor turn up dead, Greer Hogan, a librarian-turned-sleuth who has an uncanny knack for deduction, starts digging and stumbles upon a cache of decades-old secrets that could rock the town to its core.

"Liesl Weiss has been (mostly) happy working in the rare books department of a large university, managing details and working behind the scenes to make the head of the department look good. But when her boss has a stroke and she's left to run things, she discovers that the library's most prized manuscript is missing. Liesl tries to sound the alarm and inform the police about the missing priceless book but is told repeatedly to keep quiet to keep the...

"Marvey, still adjusting to life in Peach Coast, Georgia, is at a library fundraising event when she comes across a list of four names. One is the name of someone who recently died--and who may have been murdered. Another is Spencer Holt, the handsome newspaper owner who's become one of Marvey's best friends. The four people appear to have nothing in common other than living in Peach Coast. Spencer dismisses the list at first, but before long, he...

When Oliver began work as a school librarian she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis-support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveillance. Here she highlights the national problems that have existed in library since they were founded:...

"Daraya lies on the fringe of Damascus, just southwest of the Syrian capital. Yet for four years it lived in another world. Besieged by government forces early in the Syrian Civil War, its people were deprived of food, bombarded by heavy artillery, and under the constant fire of snipers. But deep beneath this scene of frightening devastation lay a hidden library. While the streets above echoed with shelling and rifle fire, the secret world below was...