THE ABSOLUTE BOOK

A tale of hidden secrets, hidden worlds, and the price we pay for our hidden desires.

Taryn Cornick’s sister, Beatrice, was killed in a random attack when Taryn was 19. When the murderer turns up dead, the police question Taryn, mainly as a formality—though young detective Jacob Berger remains convinced she had something to do with it. Years later, after having written a book about all kinds of threats to books and libraries—bears, mold, silverfish, budget cuts—Taryn starts losing time. Someone or something else seems to be speaking through her, asking about a fire in her grandparents’ library and something that came through the fire undamaged, an “ancient scroll box known as 'the Firestarter,' ” which has supposedly “survived no fewer than five fires in famous libraries.” And then, on her way to visit a French library, Taryn is attacked, and she, Jacob Berger, and a strange young man all fall through a doorway into another world. All these threads—Taryn’s loss, her desire for revenge, her complicity in murder, and the mysterious box that can’t be burned—are drawn together slowly and carefully over the course of this densely woven novel. Elements that might strain credulity in a lesser writer’s hands here read like simple facts. In particular, Knox has created a faerie realm that’s seductively tactile. The ending is a little too neat and solves a problem that’s at best tangential to the main plot, but overall the book is such a rich feast that it’s well worth reading.

This darkly luminous fantasy reads like a mystery, thoroughly and wonderfully transporting readers to another world.