The gist of the story concerns Elisabeth Scrivener who is an orphan raised in the Great library of Summershall where she learned the delicate arts of tending to books and the blunter arts of guarding them against the world and guarding the world against them. But when damaged, even inadvertently, they mutate into ravening monsters rising up in fury, the warp spreading from the pages as sinuously as ink clouding through a glass of clean water, and they are called “Malefics.” In this world, books are a soft warding from the beings that stalk the night and trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickles beneath the surface. That you are a part of something, part of its world, not just skating around the edges, too tied up in yourself to join in…and then it ends and the illusion winks out, like a snuffed flame, and you’re left marooned, adrift, your head chilled in its absence.įrom the first page, the real world takes a seat at the back, and Rogerson’s imaginary one holds center stage. Perhaps the cruelest and kindest thing a good book does is make you believe you live inside it for the space of a few hundred pages. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed, and a future she could never have imagined. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but the world along with them.Īs her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she’s been taught-about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery-magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything.

Sorcery of thorns grimoire edition