The Library Book

“A constant pleasure to read…Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book.”   -  The Washington Post

A dazzling love letter to a beloved institution — and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries — from the bestselling author hailed as a “national treasure” by The Washington Post.

On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and bestselling author Susan Orlean deliver a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.