The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
How many new authors have you tried so far this year? Every month, through our Debut of the Month promotion, we get the chance to introduce you to one we feel sure you’ll be glad you met. Looking out for and choosing these debuts really keeps our booksellers alive to the magic of reading – and we hope it does that for you too. That’s what debuts are for. Each time you call into our stores for a new book, you get the chance to enter a fresh new world, and to support an emerging artist. Do continue to be on the lookout for our featured debuts. Maybe the one you pick this time will open more doors than you expect…in fact, in this case, we pretty much guarantee it.
As a reader, you can’t help but adore a story that knows and celebrates the magic of reading. And then, some books have books in them that actually are magic. That’s what we have here: a fantastical debut novel that’s full to brimming with sorcery both real and metaphorical
Cassie, a New York Bookseller, lives a quiet life. You might call it bookish. She doesn’t ask for all that much and she has few concrete plans for the future.
One thing she can always rely on is the quiet presence of her beloved Mr Webber – a soft-spoken elderly gentleman who frequents the bookshop and has many a gentle story to tell should one care to listen. But as is often the case, there’s more to the old man than she realises. When he dies suddenly, the last book he was reading passes into her possession, left to her as an inexplicable gift: a little brown notebook full of spiralling illegible script and enigmatic drawings. It scoops her wholly from her ordinary life. To begin with she can make little sense of its strange language. But the first page has a message for her, something unmistakable.
It reads:
“This is the Book of Doors.
Hold it in your hand and any door is all doors.”
This pretty phrase, this odd notebook, is the start of it all. Cassie quickly discovers that a book can hold, and bestow, more power than even she had thought. She and her best friend Izzy find themselves able to slip time and place, find themselves with extraordinary new abilities. The Book of Doors, however, is not the only magical book out there… and some of them are capable of terrifying things. Cassie has it now, but there are those, a special kind of collector, who will stop at nothing to hunt it down, who’ll do anything to take it for themselves. How can anywhere be safe when all doors lead everywhere?
When a stranger enters the picture – one who calls himself a librarian – Cassie has to decide whether she can trust him… and whether she should follow him to the unique library of magical tomes that only he, with the aid of The Book of Doors, can find. Will she become a protector of the magical? Or a victim of a dark and deadly contest into which she has been unwittingly thrust?
Perfect for fans of The Midnight Library and The Night Circus, but undoubtedly adding its own blend of darkness and wonder, The Book of Doors is an unusual and utterly addictive testament to imagination and a grand tribute to the infinite realms a book can take you to.