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  • Location: France, Paris

The Library of Unrequited Love

The Library of Unrequited Love

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: Imagine being locked inside a library for the night?

  • ISBN: 978-1780870519
  • Translator: Sian Reynolds
  • Genre: novella

What you need to know before your trail

One morning a librarian finds a reader who has been locked in overnight. This reader is never identified – a man or a woman we don’t know. What we do know is that the librarian is keen to chat and talk through many issues she finds interesting or annoying such as her snobby colleagues and some of the weird customers who come in the door. The workings of the library come into play as well as there are more than a few things wrong with that. What about the books themselves and what they contain? Well, she has a few things to say about them as well.

She really however wants to talk about her unrequited passion for a researcher named Martin, and an ardent and absolute love for the arts.

Travel Guide

A love song to libraries and librarians everywhere

The novella is set in France but for purposes of this booktrail, we detail a few lovely libraries in Paris to visit to say thank you to libraries everywhere.

The librarian in this novella has worked in the geography section for some 25 years and she loves the peace and quiet of the place. She enjoys the order and the precision of her day

“I could never work in a railway station: too much going on and the very idea that a train was going to be late would give me a panic attack.”

She sees herself as the ultimate librarian for her nature suits her role and vice versa. She does not have a creative mind as such as she likes order and for classification so working in a library more than suits her. Every day is as she expects so for a stranger to be locked in, for her to find them, for her order and cocoon existence to be shook up in this way is very unsettling.

But no one says ‘SSh’ for this novella is one long monologue of a librarian out in the spotlight as it were for the very first time. She talks about librarians, books, male writers such as Jean Paul Sartre and men in the real world. Fact and fiction collide.

Booktrail Boarding Pass Information:  The Library of Unrequited Love

Author/ Guide: Sophie Divry Destination: France, Paris  Departure Time:  2000s

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