The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections(101)

Reading Group Guide


1. What was your first impression of Liesl, as a leader, as a parent, as a woman? Did your opinion change throughout the book?

2. Everyone except Liesl is extremely reluctant to involve the police. What do they fear? What are the consequences of that fear?

3. Liesl often has to swallow her feelings to get along with her colleagues and family. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you couldn’t be honest about what you felt? What impact did that have? How does Liesl’s isolation affect her search for the Plantin?

4. The Peshawar facsimile at the book fair makes Liesl uncomfortable. Do you think reproductions of rare books or art cheapen the original? What do you see as the difference between a facsimile and a forgery?

5. The characters at the library spend their days surrounded by priceless books. Was there a title in the library’s collection that especially moved you? Which of the books would you have stolen to keep for yourself?

6. Francis is a complicated character, especially from Liesl’s perspective. Were you rooting for him? Did you think he deserved Max’s suspicion? How did Liesl’s feelings about him shape your impression?

7. Liesl mentions having “never had more authority and less control in my life.” What’s the difference between authority and control? Have you ever been in a similar position?

8. One of the barriers that prevented Miriam from seeking treatment for her depression was the possibility of people calling her “crazy” for it. How has mental health stigma shifted throughout your life? Where is it most persistent?

9. Vivek ends the book carrying a lot of guilt for his inability to help Miriam. What do you think happens to Vivek after the end of the book?

10. Hannah points out that there’s a difference between putting your name forward for a promotion and doing your work well and hoping people will one day notice. Where do you fall on that scale? How do these competing theories shape the workforce, especially in how men and women are evaluated at work?

11. Of Detective Yuan’s list of noncommercial motivations for theft—revenge, thrill, passion—which did you think was most likely? Who did that make you suspect?

12. When the thief was revealed, what were your thoughts? How well do we know the people around us? Do we know more or less once they leave us for good?

13. Would you take the chief librarian position in Liesl’s place? Do you think her final decision was the right one?





A Conversation with the Author


What was the inspiration for The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections?

I’ve worked in libraries for a long time, so that had a lot to do with my decision to set the book in a library. But what I really wanted to explore was the character of a woman who was older than a traditional protagonist in fiction. I had just become a mother when I started writing the novel and I had heard older women in my life say that at some point as a woman, you just become invisible. I became obsessed with that idea—the way that women are seen, or not seen, through the different stages of their life.

How have your own experiences in libraries shaped this book?

When I was a graduate student I worked in a rare books library, and it was one of the coolest experiences of my life. The librarians had the most fascinating backstories (Soviet defection, love affairs with ballet dancers—and that’s just one woman’s out of the bunch), and they spent every day surrounded by treasure. Writing the book was a way to spend more time in that place, even if it was just in my imagination.

The final chapters of the book read almost like a love letter to libraries and books. How would you describe the role of an ideal library?

Isn’t every library an ideal library? When I was a kid, I spent half my life in my little community branch that was scarcely larger than a corner store, but they had dozens of Nancy Drew novels and back issues of Spin magazine. It was perfect. As an undergrad I would use a study carrel to nap between classes. It was perfect. When I lived overseas I would go to the British Museum on my lunch break and peer through the window at the papier-maché ceiling of the great reading room where Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf used to do their work. Perfect. Now I take my son to the sort-of-smelly children’s section of our local branch in a 150-year-old former postal station and we sing our hearts out to “Baby Shark” with the children’s librarian. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

Speaking of past and future, the dating of the Peshawar manuscript is quite the controversy here. Which do you think is a greater responsibility, preservation or understanding?

The goal of preservation of cultural property is to aid in understanding. But that understanding shouldn’t come at the expense of preservation. There’s a certain amount of hubris in that, isn’t there? In thinking that you are equipped to extract all of the meaning from a thing, that you have no responsibility to leave the thing for the people who come after you. In the case of Rhonda’s project to date the Peshawar, there was care and respect for preserving the Peshawar manuscript as her team sought to understand. I wouldn’t have let them do it without that care and respect!

What draws you to crime fiction as a writer? As a reader?

Plot, plot, plot, plot, plot. As a reader, I love the feeling of needing to turn the page. As a writer, committing and solving crimes gives my characters something interesting to do. If left to my own devices, I would write snappy conversations between characters in cool locations and nothing would ever happen.