Pay no attention to the snore-worthy title; Jon Fasman’s THE GEOGRAPHER’S LIBRARY is the best novel I’ve read so far this year.
A newly graduated journalist investigates the mysterious death of an even more mysterious professor for the small-town newspaper he works for; meanwhile, Fasman uses every other chapter to fashion a brief narrative concerning an antiquity scattered to one corner of the world or another. How and why these two threads intersect slowly becomes apparent on a need-to-know basis, and you’ll love it because it’s like getting a dozen stories in one.
Usually novels that split themselves over two narratives of different time periods frustrate and/or confuse me (that’s you, THE EIGHT and THE INTELLIGENCER), but this one is done masterfully. This unconventional mystery’s mix of the historical and the academic reminded me a lot of THE RULE OF FOUR – a bestseller from last year – as it successfully captures that feeling of college-era loneliness and nostalgia, complete with heartbreak, all wrapped around a rather cerebral mystery. But LIBRARY is even better.
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