National Library Week has once again drawn to a close, but there's no reason why we can't continue to celebrate libraries all year round. Here are some of our favorite fictional libraries and librarians in books for teens and adults. If you're interested in reading about real libraries and librarians, make sure to check out the 2021 Andover Reads title, The Library Book by Susan Orlean (and listen to MHL's Shelf Help podcast!)
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Ink and bone : The Great Library
by Rachel Caine Working in an alternate universe where the Great Library of Alexandria survived destruction, Jess is torn between his employers and his family's black-market book ring before an illegal innovation leads to a terrible discovery. |
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Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library
by Chris Grabenstein Twelve-year-old Kyle wins a coveted spot to be one of 12 children chosen to stay in the new town library--designed by his hero, the famous gamemaker Luigi Lemoncello--for an overnight of fun, food and games, but in the morning, the kids find all the doors still locked and must work together to solve secret puzzles in order to discover the hidden escape route. |
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Shadow of the Batgirl
by Sarah Kuhn Cassandra Cain is the daughter of super-villains and a living weapon trained to be the ultimate assassin, but when her father threatens the world she has grown to love, she will have to overcome that voice inside her head telling her she can never be a hero. |
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Sparrow
by Sarah Moon Fourteen-year-old Sparrow Cooke of Brooklyn has always been the kind of child who prefers reading books to playing with friends (not that she has many of those) and since fifth grade the one person who seemed to understand her was the school librarian--so when Mrs. Wexler was killed in an accident Sparrow's world came apart, and when she was found on the edge of the school roof everyone assumed that it was a suicide attempt, which Sparrow denies, but cannot find the words to explain. |
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Lirael, daughter of the Clayr
by Garth Nix When a dangerous necromancer threatens to unleash a long-buried evil, Lirael and Prince Sameth are drawn into a battle to save the Old Kingdom and reveal their true destinies. |
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Shadowshaper
by Daniel José Older When her summer plans are interrupted by creepy supernatural phenomena, Sierra and her artist friend uncover the work of a magic-wielding killer who believes Sierra's family is hiding a powerful secret. |
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Akata witch
by Nnedi Okorafor Twelve-year-old Sunny Nwazue, an American-born albino child of Nigerian parents, moves with her family back to Nigeria, where she learns that she has latent magical powers which she and three similarly gifted friends use to catch a serial killer. |
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Bookish and the beast
by Ashley Poston In this adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast," the teenaged star of a popular science fiction movie franchise hides out in a small town, following a tabloid scandal, and meets the bookish Rosie Thorne who is still grieving over her mother's death. |
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Alcatraz versus the evil Librarians
by Brandon Sanderson When he comes into the possession of a special bag of sand that has the power to transform information, Alcatraz realizes the importance of this mysterious gift when it is stolen by a group of Evil Librarians who use it to suppress truth and spread lies in order to achieve world domination. |
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Doctor Strange : the way of the weird
by Jason Aaron Waking up with no weapons, spell books, memory of how he got there, or knowledge of why monsters are chasing him, Doctor Strange and his allies prepare to face their greatest threat in the last days of magic |
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Batgirl/Robin year one : Year One
by Scott Beatty Presents the origin stories of Robin and Batgirl, from Robin's first time patrolling Gotham City alongside Batman to Batgirl's transformation from average citizen to costumed super-heroine. |
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The Paris library : a novel
by Janet Skeslien Charles Based on a true story, describes how a lonely, 1980s teenager befriends an elderly neighbor and uncovers her past as a librarian at the American Library in Paris who joined the Resistance when the Nazis arrived. |
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The invisible library
by Genevieve Cogman An undercover librarian who works for an occult organization that collects books from different realities must determine what happened to a particularly dangerous book that has been stolen and becomes mired in a mystery infused with peril and conflicting clues. |
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The little clan
by Iris Martin Cohen Ava Gallanter is the librarian in residence at the Lazarus Club, an ancient, dwindling Manhattan arts club full of eccentric geriatric residents stuck in a long-gone era. Twenty-five-year-old Ava, however, feels right at home. She leads a quiet life, surrounded by her beloved books and sequestered away from her peers. When Ava's enigmatic friend Stephanie returns after an unplanned year abroad, the intoxicating opportunist vows to rescue Ava from a life of obscurity. Stephanie, on the hunt for fame and fortune, promises to make Ava's dream of becoming a writer come true, and together they start a Victorian-inspired literary salon at the Lazarus Club. However, Ava's romanticized idea of the salon quickly erodes as Stephanie's ambitions take the women in an unexpected--and precarious--direction. |
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The Librarians and the lost lamp
by Greg Cox The protectors of the world¡s dangerous magical relics spring into action when criminal organization The Forty steals the oldest known copy of The Arabian Nights, in the first novel of a trilogy based on the television show The Librarians. |
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Welcome to Night Vale : a novel
by Joseph Fink Handed a message by a mysterious man, a young pawn shop owner embarks on a psychologically dangerous mystery that entangles her in the life of the local PTA treasurer, who helplessly watches her son's growing obsession with his absent father. Based on the #1 international hit podcast. |
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The lending library
by Aliza Fogelson When the Chatsworth library closes indefinitely, small-town art teacher Dodie Fairisle turns her sunroom into her very own little lending library, which leads to both new friendships and romance, as well as an unexpected chance to realize her secret dream of motherhood. |
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The Absolute Sandman. Volume One
by Neil Gaiman Blending modern myth and dark fantasy, a fascinating collection of the comics classic The Sandman features completely new coloring, a gallery of character designs from Gaiman and the artist who originated the look of the Sandman, and a host of never-before-seen material. |
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The library of the unwritten
by A. J. Hackwith Assigned to watch the restless characters of books left unfinished by their authors, a head librarian of Hell’s neutral Unwritten Wing tracks an escaped Hero before an angel attack reveals the existence of a powerful literary weapon. |
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The midnight library
by Matt Haig Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, or realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. |
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Jade Dragon Mountain
by Elsa Hart An exiled imperial librarian traveling through the eighteenth-century Chinese-Tibetan borderlands is charged with uncovering the truth about a Jesuit priest's death before a scheduled visit by the Emperor. |
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The library at the edge of the world : a novel
by Felicity Hayes-McCoy A debut novel by the author of The House on an Irish Hillside traces the experiences of a librarian on the scenic west coast of Ireland who searches for a way to rebuild her community and her own life in the wake of local estrangements. |
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The widening stain
by W. Bolingbroke Johnson Murders plague a university library--and only an intrepid book cataloger can solve them. For the staff of the library at the center of The Widening Stain, it's easy enough to dismiss the death of a woman who fell from a rolling ladder as nothing more than an unfortunate accident. It's more difficult, however, to explain away the strangled corpse of a man found inside a locked room, surrounded by rare and obscure erotica. And that's not all--a valuable manuscript has vanished from the stacks, which means that both a killer and a thief are loose in the facility's hallowed halls. It's up to chief cataloger Gilda Gorham to solve the crimes but, unless she's careful, the next death in the library might just be her own... A humorous and literary Golden Age mystery, The Widening Stain is adorned with as many playful limericks as it is with bibliographic details. The book, with offers a satirical glimpse of academic life at an institution strongly resembling Cornell University, is one of the most beloved bibliomysteries of all time. |
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The borrower
by Rebecca Makkai Placed in an impossible situation when her favorite patron, a book-loving 10-year old, runs away from overbearing parents who force him to attend anti-gay classes with a celebrity pastor, children's librarian Lucy Hull flees with the boy only to discover that they are being pursued by an anonymous adversary. |
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The Dark Library
by Cyrille Martinez Libraries are magical places. But what if they're even more magical than we know? In Cyrille Martinez's library, the books are alive: not just their ideas or their stories, but the books themselves. The Dark Library is a theoretical fiction, a meditation on what libraries mean in our digital world. Has the act of reading changed? What is a reader? A book? Martinez, a librarian himself, has written a love letter to the urban forest of the dark, wild library, where ideas and stories roam free. |
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The starless sea
by Erin Morgenstern Discovering a mysterious book of prisoner tales, a Vermont graduate student recognizes a story from his own life before following clues to a magical underground library that is being targeted for destruction. By the best-selling author of The Night Circus. |
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Kafka on the shore
by Haruki Murakami The unlikely alliance between Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old runaway, and the aging Nakata, a man who has never recovered from a wartime affliction, brings dramatic changes to both characters as they embark on a surreal odyssey through a strange, sometimes violent, sometimes fantastical world. |
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The book woman of Troublesome Creek : a novel
by Kim Michele Richardson A last-of-her-kind outcast and member of the Pack Horse Library Project braves the hardships of Kentucky's Great Depression and hostile community discrimination to bring the near-magical perspectives of books to her neighbors. |
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Deal with the devil
by Kit Rocha An information broker whose librarian team uses knowledge to protect a crumbling America and a battle-weary supersoldier who is fighting for survival after refusing to target innocents become rivals and then unlikely partners in a quest to save the world. |
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Unseen city : a novel
by Amy Shearn In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It's a question Meg Rhys doesn't think she's asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister's ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he's trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism's fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn. What follows is an exploration of what home is, how we live with loss, who belongs in the city and to whom the city belongs, and the possibilities and power of love. |
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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Giles : Girl Blue
by Joss Whedon Watcher Rupert Giles, reincarnated into a teenager and forced to return to high school, investigates a string of disappearances when he encounters Roux, a vampire who is more than she appears. |