I don’t really get that infatuation with all this shiny brass, cogs and levers and steam in places where they have no right to be. The novels take place mostly in a pseudo-Victorian world with elements of magic and steampunk. However, the library is not the only setting. Sounds wonderful, if you ask me – a bookworm’s dream made real :).

You can always go for a field trip, a mission to retrieve a rare and important book, and some such, but after reaching certain age you stay on the grounds of the Library and do research. If you stay there, within the immaterial borders of this Universe’s center of order and structure, you don’t age. Plus, a bonus of being a librarian is that you can live almost endlessly – in the Library time literary stops. The librarians of the Invisible Library are skilled in deception, theft, martial arts, alternate histories and bunch of other really interesting topics, all of which should automatically make them into a nerdy form of James Bond. This sounded so much like Borges and Eco and Pratchett that I was instantly hooked. To sum it up, the keywords list would look something like this: urban fantasy, YA, parallel universes, steampunk, mystery, books.Īnd what made me pick Cogman’s novel over hundreds of similar others was the Invisible Library itself – the fundamental idea of a between-space library, a hub of intersecting paths to thousands of worlds, a place where all knowledge, actual and possible, is stored and treasured by a host of very peculiar librarians. It’s an urban fantasy with a twist – the “urban” part being Victorian, and the twist being the titular Invisible Library, a place intended to hold all books of all worlds, and their countless variations appearing in the thousands of possible realities.

The novels are fairly popular, with solid reviews and good opinions of readers.

The Invisible Library is the first installment in the Invisible Library series (3 books total now). So it’s not entirely The Invisible Library’s fault that I got what I wished for – and I wasn’t happy about it, not a bit.īut to the point. In short, I wanted a bit of easy entertainment ). After Seveneves, a book admittedly on the heavy side of the genre spectrum, both in literal and metaphoric sense, I wanted something lighter and unassuming, a comeback of sorts to typical urban fantasy.

The invisible library books in order