The peoples library, p.1
The People's Library, page 1
Praise for Veronica G. Henry
The Canopy Keepers
“A fascinating tale . . . Henry digs in to themes of family, environmentalism, and the connection between humans and the natural world.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Henry’s near-future fantasy world is interesting and beautiful, with lush descriptions of the forest and the fantastical world hidden within.”
—Library Journal
“Henry adeptly navigates the communication struggles among families and the destructive forces of climate change in this thrilling fantasy.”
—Booklist
“Perfectly balanced between the fantastical and sharp reality, The Canopy Keepers is a genre-defying work as prescient as it is brilliant. Henry has written yet another extraordinary novel everyone should be reading.”
—Cadwell Turnbull, award-winning author of No Gods, No Monsters
“A gripping, compelling story with themes of great significance to us all.”
—Shiv Ramdas, author of Domechild
“The Canopy Keepers is a gorgeous love story for national parks, trees, and the people who protect them. Veronica Henry’s characters are strong, complicated heroes, and her world is delicately, lovingly drawn—and an anguished reminder of everything we are losing day by day.”
—Yume Kitasei, author of The Stardust Grail
Bacchanal
“Henry skillfully layers historical realism with fantastic elements to explore the way times of desperation test the ethics of oppressed communities. Henry is a writer to watch.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Henry’s debut draws on a rich history of folklore from various African traditions, as well as African history and Black American history, and almost the entire main cast is Black. The carnival setting works perfectly for bringing together various strange and magical people who aren’t at home anywhere else . . . Come one, come all, this magical carnival has all the delightful dangers a reader could wish for.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Bacchanal is] gorgeous while somehow never losing sight of the need to unsettle. It captures a sense of wonder and reminds you that too much curiosity can lead to danger. And most importantly, it’s Black and never lets you forget it. If you want endearing characters, a charming setting, and characters that refuse to bend to the world’s injustices, then Bacchanal is the book for you.”
—FIYAH
“Set in the Depression-era South and featuring a mysterious traveling carnival, [Bacchanal is] a novel of Black history and magic that makes for a terrific read.”
—The Washington Post
“Beautifully descriptive prose that fully captures the places, people, and time period.”
—Booklist
“Think of a Southern Gothic version of [Jane Yolen’s] The Midnight Circus with a touch of Lovecraft Country . . . nail-biting scenes of tension.”
—Lightspeed
“Filled with magic, danger, and dynamic characters.”
—Woman’s World
“With a powerful voice that grips you from its very first pages, Bacchanal casts a spell on readers . . . Eliza is a wonderful character . . . Not a traditional superhero, Eliza’s special power is a highlight of this work, and readers will root for the young conjurer and for Henry as she explores the limits of her gifts.”
—Sheree Renée Thomas, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, award-winning author of Nine Bar Blues, and featured author in Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda
“Veronica Henry pulls on a mix of African folklore, Black histories, and carnival culture to weave a story of mesmerizing, bizarre, and dangerous magic. With a heroine of unique powers and a cast as colorful as any sideshow, this story offers up its share of delights, adventure, and frights! Welcome to Bacchanal. Enjoy the sights. Hope you make it out alive!”
—P. Djèlí Clark, author of Ring Shout, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, and The Black God’s Drums
“Readers won’t want their travels with the seductive and dangerous Bacchanal Carnival to end. If you took [Erin Morgenstern’s] The Night Circus and viewed it through the gaze of a young Black woman in the Great Depression, you might get Veronica Henry’s Bacchanal. Demons, lies, and secrets [await].”
—Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo Award–winning author of The Calculating Stars
Also by Veronica G. Henry
Stand-Alone Novel
Bacchanal
The Mambo Reina Series
The Quarter Storm
The Foreign Exchange
The Scorched Earth Series
The Canopy Keepers
A Breathless Sky
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2026 by Veronica Henry
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
EU product safety contact:
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ISBN-13: 9781662520297 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781662520303 (digital)
Cover design by Jarrod Taylor and Logan Matthews
Cover image: © Mark Fearon / ArcAngel Images; © metamorworks, © SkillUp, © StarLine / Shutterstock
For librarians everywhere
Contents
Prologue
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part II
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Part III
Interlude
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Postlude
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
Welcome to a place called Promise. Vast and open as a rose in full bloom. Formless and adrift. Absent smell and taste and touch and sight. Promise is as unknowable as it is inaccessible. A place of pure potentiality. Guided by cosmic hands of infinite wisdom, substance and reality are birthed.
It is not a place for corporeal beings, not in the sense one would understand. Neither warm nor cold. Brilliant darkness swirling with limitless possibility. A mosaic of consciousness. Biding time. Content to wait.
From this fertile wellspring, it all begins.
Years from now, as Echo London sucks in her last breath, she will recall with a certain detached horror the events surrounding her last week at the People’s Library and wonder if Time’s Eye judged her harshly.
Part I
When it all began, in that time before time, existence did not exist.
—Unknown
Chapter One
If Echo London had been born in a different time, a remote setting where the velvet curtains of night parted around a fire where villagers gathered to feast on a story, she wouldn’t have been the griot, but she would surely have been the one to point out the right person for the job. She loved all the elements that make up a good narrative as a five-star chef loves farm-fresh ingredients. Becoming a librarian was a foregone conclusion.
Echo rested a rounded hip against the moving walkway’s glass balustrade as she watched her Ohio City neighborhood emerge from its glittering slumber. From the clear-paned scroll beneath her feet to the digital markers blinking like eager salespeople along the storefronts, an unbroken stream of dazzling advertisements appeared, each one extolling another of Cleveland’s proud achievements
environmental-rebound awards, a rich history of artistic geniuses, its globally recognized leadership in ethical AI research. She tried to ignore the way the words flickered, recalibrating themselves when she blinked, as if sensing which slogans worked best.
This, the country’s proclaimed “comeback city,” had turned into an urban peacock, boasting about its past, present, and indisputable future, a thumbing of the nose to anybody who’d ever doubted it.
Echo turned away, only to find her gaze drawn upward to the mammoth billboard sitting atop a building that had hosted a variety of tenants over the years. The former bank, once and now again a space for green-themed small businesses. The ad shone with the city’s young mayor and a crew of hangers-on posing in front of the People’s Library, dubbed TPL. Toothy grins wider than the chasm between what they thought the public wanted and reality, had they bothered to ask.
The text scrolling along the bottom of the display announced the imminent opening. She sensed a date at the end of that sentence and turned away, even though she’d been practicing how to allow her gaze to gloss over numbers. Because there was a cost if she didn’t.
Less than 5 percent of the population had synesthesia, and Echo was one of them. Each case manifested differently. For her, the grapheme-color strain meant that numbers weren’t just figures; they had an associated color and emotion. Zeros were mostly neutral, leaning toward either gray, evoking a kind of melancholy, or an ambivalent, impartial black. Ones were another thing altogether. And don’t even mention combinations. Those frenetic emotions had cost her so much.
TPL would be the first library whose offerings comprised the world’s only digital human collection. Copies of history’s most fascinating people, reduced to pixelated knockoffs so that patrons could interact with them for a supposedly richer experience than text or audio alone could offer.
It was hard to even picture it, but people would be able to “check out” a member of the collection with the help of an AI librarian named Ada, after the famous programmer. Then all you’d have to do was close yourself off in a kind of cubby or booth and chat it up with this facsimile of the real person. Not just rote, preprogrammed responses either . . . real conversations. Rumor had it they were working on a feature that would let you do walk and talks throughout the library too. Sounded to Echo like all the denials about curtailing artificial general intelligence advancement were just political sound bites. Some marketing genius had coined the term “virtual personages” for them, but a kid from Garfield Heights had trimmed the name to “virtus,” and it had stuck. “Dupefakes” was another, more uncharitable alternative.
What an ostentatious absurdity. At least she’d never have to set foot in the place.
With one last eye roll, Echo turned away from the billboard. The Lorain Ave exit was next. The city’s new solar-powered walkways, “solarways” for short, were another, speedier attempt to reduce car traffic, replacing some of the sidewalks on all major thoroughfares. They weren’t all that different from the ones found in airports. You’d think she would have gotten the hang of them by now. Barely two feet separated one lane from the other, and if you wanted to cross over—well, especially after being shot off the thing like a missile—you’d need the dexterity of a star running back to twist your way out of an oncomer’s path. A design flaw if she’d ever seen one. She braced herself for the somewhat jerky dismount and hopped off, only to be pitched into a man who smelled like he’d dragged himself out from the Flats, with last night’s booze still clinging to his unbuttoned shirt.
“Excuse me,” Echo said, putting some distance between them.
“Wha . . . ?” the bleary-eyed man grunted and kept walking a crooked line.
The subsurface smart panels lit up; then an alert sounded. “The pattern of your steps suggests you may have consumed an excessive amount of alcohol. Would you like for me to call a transport for you?”
“Screw you, man,” the drunkard said and tottered off, stumbling through a mountain of neatly collected fall leaves.
“That’s unfortunate,” the alert responded. “Authorities have been notified. Please proceed to your place of residence without delay.”
Shaking her head, Echo made her way to the intersection of Lorain Avenue and Fulton Road, where she hung a right. The neighborhood was a mix of low apartment buildings and restored Victorian-era houses in a variety of styles. Aside from the homes, two standouts shared these narrow streets: a Gothic church whose bell still rang every Sunday before service and the neighborhood park that housed the F. M. Lewis Library.
As soon as the building’s familiar silhouette appeared, framed in the soft hush and rustle of a copse of northern red oaks, a calm settled around her too. It loosened the tightness in her shoulders, the constriction in her chest. It was almost as if the library saw her coming and reached out with a grandmother’s welcoming arms, saying, Come, come inside. You’re safe here.
A renaissance masterpiece of terra-cotta bricks and fluted columns, with the branch name proudly etched into the stone above the entrance. Now this . . . this was a fitting home for books.
A couple of police cars and an unmarked van sat parked at the curb down the street. She saw a few folks casually strolling down the sidewalk and another couple pushing a double-wide baby carriage, but no officers or security sentries. Strange, Echo thought.
She turned away and trotted up the stairs and let herself in with a quick scan of her fingerprint. As she closed the door behind her, a few patrons were already gathering in the grassy area out front waiting for opening, always at nine sharp. After a quick wave, she turned to get ready for the busy day.
It was the lights that threw her off. Coming into the entrance hallway, she noticed the glow against the wooden floor, to the left of the circulation desk. It had to be coming from the staff room. But nobody ever beat her here.
She rounded the corner and found the door slightly ajar. She pushed it open to find her boss, Percy, sitting at the table with his hands folded in front of him, as if in deep contemplation, or prayer. He had hired her to lead this library twelve years ago. In all that time, all but two of their frequent conversations had taken place on-screen, since he lived in Atlanta.
He looked up at her wearing an expression reserved for delivering only the worst news. Echo’s heart sank, even if she had no idea why yet. He stood. “You may as well sit down for this one.”
Percy Grafton was older than Echo by at least twenty years, though still young by today’s standards, with the average lifespan pushing ninety. He seemed to have aged considerably from when she’d seen him last, his skin now as ashen as rocks on the shore.
“Sitting down never made hearing bad news any easier for me,” Echo said, still hovering in the doorway.
“Up to you, then,” Percy replied. He’d emigrated from the UK as a teen, but the accent came out of hiding when he was stressed. He trudged over to the window and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. He slumped against the wooden frame and exhaled softly. “Caught me completely off guard, this did. You must understand. I would have warned you otherwise.”
Now Echo’s hands were trembling. “Warned me about what?”
“The vote was unanimous.” He rapped his knuckles against the wall. “Leadership at the National Literary Commission, in their infinite lack of wisdom, have decided to close this old place.” He turned to face her then, with a look akin to pleading in his eyes.
Echo pulled out a chair, sank into the worn vegan leather, and buried her face in her hands. After a few moments of fighting back the flood of emotion, she asked, “Closing? The library? What on earth for? You—” With a look from Percy, she corrected herself. “They can’t be serious. We’ll change their minds. Both of us. We’ll go talk some sense into them.”
“Requested and already denied,” Percy stated.
Other branches had closed, that was the reality of their time, but the ones that remained were strong. The communities they served loved them. She’d somehow thought that what she and her staff had done here would make them immune.
“They can’t do this,” Echo said.
“Oh, but they can and they did,” Percy countered.
