Waiting on Wednesday – The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence

Welcome to my weekly segment, Waiting on Wednesday, where I look at upcoming books that I am planning to order and review in the next few months and which I think I will really enjoy. I run this segment in conjunction with the Can’t-Wait Wednesday meme that is currently running at Wishful Endings. Stay tuned to see reviews of these books when I get a copy of them. For this week’s entry I look at one of the most anticipated and potentially imaginative fantasy novels of 2024 with The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence.

The Book That Broke the World Cover

Amazon

In early 2023 I was extremely lucky to receive a copy of the latest book from Mark Lawrence, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn. The first entry in Lawrence’s The Library trilogy, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was a bold and compelling novel set in an intriguing new setting of an impossibly large library. Following two damaged protagonists who have very different experiences about the library and its secrets, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn was an exceptional novel, whose scope, creativity and unique story really drew me in. I had an incredible time reading The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, and not only did it get a full five-star rating from me, but it was also an easy inclusion on my recent Favourite Books of 2023 list. I was so very impressed with The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, and I have been eagerly waiting to find out details about a potential sequel and luckily it doesn’t look like I’ll have to much longer to wait.

This upcoming sequel is The Book That Broke the World, which is currently set for release in April 2024. The Book That Broke the World will take place after the chaotic conclusion of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn and will see the two protagonists thrust into a whole new level of peril as they try to save themselves, their friends, and the library itself.

Plot Synopsis:

Two people living in a world connected by an immense and mysterious library must fight for those they love in the second book in a new trilogy from the international bestselling author of The Book That Wouldn’t Burn.

The Library spans worlds and times. It touches and joins distant places. It is memory and future. And amid its vastness Evar Eventari both found, and lost, Livira Page.

Evar has been forced to flee the library, driven before an implacable foe. Livira, trapped in a ghost world, has to recover the book she wrote—one which is the only true threat to the library’s existence—if she’s to return to her life.

While Evar’s journey leads him outside into a world he’s never seen, Livira’s path will taker her deep inside her own writing, where she must wrestle with her stories in order to reclaim the volume in which they were written.

The secret war that defines the library has chosen its champions and set them on the board. The time has come when they must fight for what they believe, or lose everything.

This sounds like a pretty awesome read and I am so looking forward to it. Lawrence has cooked up a very interesting plot for The Book That Broke the World, especially as it seems that he is planning to do a reversal on the protagonist’s fates, with Evar trapped outside the library after a lifetime stuck within, while Livira, the cagey outsider who entered the library after her childhood in the desert, will be trapped within learning more about its secrets and herself. I have no doubt this will be a particularly character-driven plot, and I look forward to seeing how both likeable, yet troubled, protagonists continue to develop.

Based on Lawrence’s writing in the past, I have no doubt that he will continue to develop the elaborate world that surrounds the series in The Book That Broke the World, and I assume we are going to see more timelines, more visions of past and future wars, and more of the long-running conflict between the two races that trade control of the library and its resources. This, combined with the excellent story and character work, should make for one hell of a read and I cannot wait to dive even further into this amazing series. As such, The Book That Broke the World is one of my most anticipated books for 2024 and I am so damn excited to see what incredible new narrative threads Lawrence has in store for us.