The Quiet Librarian
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
After the murder of her best friend, a librarian’s search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this "searing and timely" novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from the author of the beloved bestseller The Life We Bury (Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter).
Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.
Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia—until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend—the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.
Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora—and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.
"Fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale or Kate Quinn’s books will be caught up in this story of a courageous woman."―Library Journal (starred review)
"Exquisitely written, profoundly affecting, and undoubtedly one of the best books I will read this year.”―Louise Fein, author of The London Bookshop Affair
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The violent past comes back to haunt a woman leading a double life in this dark, hypnotic thriller. Hana Babic is a shy Midwestern librarian who the kids call the Sweater Lady. Nobody knows that 30 years earlier she was a Bosnian teenager named Nura who survived the Serbians’ genocide and wreaked revenge that was so deadly, she became notorious. Except someone does know—someone who just killed Nura’s best friend with a push off a balcony that was meant for her. Author Allen Eskens keeps the story moving at a staggering clip as Nura’s deadly survival skills begin to resurface. And he isn’t afraid to let us in on some of the darkest aspects of this brutal and tragic time in history, with the story shifting between the ’90s and the present day. Not only were we gripped by this taut cat-and-mouse game, but we were completely invested in Nura’s story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This uneven dual timeline thriller from Eskens (Saving Emma) toggles between present day Minnesota and the war in Bosnia. In early 1990s Yugoslavia, Nura Divjak lives with her Muslim parents and younger brother in a farmhouse near Tuzla (in what is now Bosnia). When her family is murdered by Serbian soldiers, Nura joins the Bosnian army and falls in love with a fellow soldier named Adem. During an ambush, Nura is captured and meets a woman named Amina Junuzović in prison. After Adem dies in battle, Amina helps Nura escape, and together, the pair flee to the United States, where Amina gives birth to Sara, the daughter of a Serb who raped her, and Nura reinvents herself as a meek librarian named Hana. Thirty years later, when Amina is thrown off her balcony, "Hana" becomes Nura once again, determined to hunt down the killer before he comes after Dylan, Amina's grandson. Nura first teams up with a handsome detective, then takes justice into her own hands, with dramatic results. Eskens strains to connect his past and present timelines, with a weak romance plot and a limp through line about Nura's affinity for building traps—first for hunting food, then for hunting her adversaries—failing to raise the cumbersome present-day sections to the level of the fast-paced, well-researched historical chapters. It's a mixed bag.
