She makes her way through the high book- shelves to the staircase, and up the stairs. In daylight, this is her territory – her hunting ground, where everything she could possibly need hides in an index or a footnote – but after the clock strikes midnight she's glad to leave with the last scholars, while the bleary-eyed attendant extinguishes the lamps. No one has been allowed here alone since the London Library was destroyed: but even if she could, she wouldn't. On bad days it's too easy to imagine losing control, dropping a match, and the dance of flame- shadows on the plaster ceiling…
A girl makes her way in a man's world by masquerading as a man, a boy to whom nothing but winning matters ultimately learns that principles matter and that there are compromises which even he cannot make, and the two of them together, as adults, are forced to acknowledge love and good intentions are not enough to make for happiness in the world, their own or anyone else's — all this in an oppressive, patriarchal regime that echoes Nazi Germany: "Home, Husband and Happiness" for women the Party, always with a capital P, imagines.