The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
Irene works as a professional spy for the enigmatic Library, a covert agency that gathers significant works of fiction from all the various realities. She has most recently been taken to a different London with her mysterious aide Kai. Their objective was to retrieve a hazardous book. The issue is that it has already been stolen by the time they get there.
The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman
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Irene works as a lower-mid-level librarian in a library located between worlds. Only on the worlds beyond, to which its agents have access by passing through a door in the Library, can time function inside the Library. The Library’s main function is to preserve and keep books, but in a universe with several, alternate realities, that means there are often multiple copies of the same book, each with subtle but nonetheless significant changes. It is the librarians who travel to these various planets (where time does operate: they become older while they are not at the library, which explains why most of them are youthful librarians who still have a lot of life in them).
The huge tattoo that is scrawled over Irene’s back connects her to the Library. Her brand starts to heat up, which allows her to detect impending danger. However, the tattoo and her grasp of the Library’s secret language also give her the power to order people and things to do incredible things, so long as the order is clear-cut and the item is being asked to do something in line with its nature. She can therefore demand “Granite, be stone, and lie still!” to stop animated stone gargoyles from pursuing her in The Invisible Library. Similarly, in The Lost Plot, she can order the ground to suffocate a pack of wolves’ feet before freezing them there.
People are more difficult to control, except only momentarily. Stone doesn’t respond to commands, not even magicked stone, therefore they usually stick.
Kai is Irene’s trainee and a future librarian. extremely handsome and mysterious in countless ways. Under stress, his physique and skin displayed strange colour flashes and irregular scales. Hello, dragon! The dragon Kai. All forms of magic and science coexist in a multiverse. Some universes are very reasonable, but others are far more chaotic. All of them follow some sort of logic, but the degree and specifics of that logic differ from one world to the next.
Risks to the Library are present in both books, as are threats to particular alternate worlds because books subtly determine universes. It’s a renegade librarian in The Invisible Library whose name alone makes a proper librarian shiver. In a Victorian-era London shrouded in fog, where vampires and werewolves can be seen living among the inhabitants, Irene and Kai must battle him.
