Brianna Labuskes

In Paris in 1936 there stood a German Library of Burned Books, stocked with the titles that had been thrown on bonfires in Berlin three years before. Brianna Labuskes built The Librarian of Burned Books (2023) around it, running three women through the story: Althea, an American writer in Berlin in 1933; Hannah Brecht, a Jewish exile working in the Paris collection; and Vivian Childs in wartime New York in 1944, fighting an amendment that would have let politicians strike titles from the Armed Services Editions shipped to soldiers overseas. It was her first historical novel. What Can't Be Seen (Thomas and Mercer, 2022) comes from the crime series that preceded it, the second case for Dr. Gretchen White, a psychologist and criminologist who consults for the Boston police and who has believed since the age of eight that she was responsible for her aunt's death. Detective Lauren Marconi sets out to prove her wrong. Labuskes spent the first decade and more of her working life reporting on politics and policy for national news organisations, and lives in Pennsylvania.