The Dragon Librarian

Some books are too dangerous to read. And one of them has just walked out into the rain.

For ten years, two months, and one soggy Tuesday, the Mossbarrow Lending Library has been shut tight, its penny-coloured door locked and its faded sign promising repairs that never seem to finish. Nell Pickle knows the building the way you know a tooth you're not supposed to wiggle. She's read everything else in town — the corner shop's two shelves, the church fete paperbacks, the backs of the cereal boxes twice and the small print once, for emergencies. So when that door swings open a hand's width, a girl who has run clean out of books does the only sensible thing. She goes in.

Inside waits Pemberton: a small, fussy, spectacle-wearing dragon roughly the size of a well-fed fox, who insists he is not a dragon at all but a librarian, thank you very much, and who has strong opinions about muddy floors and the correct way to brew tea. For forty-seven years he has guarded the Quiet Shelf — where tales too strong to tell are kept chained shut. Storms. Tigers. One very rude goose.

But nobody comes to a library any more, and a shelf nobody visits begins to rot. Now the chains are snapping. Stories are leaking out. And the cleverest, cruellest of them all has escaped: the Grand Editor, a villain who crosses people out — their names, their colours, their whole selves — until they go grey and forgetful and forget they ever had a story of their own. He's already begun rubbing out Mossbarrow. He's already begun rubbing out Nell's gran.

Armed with a glowing date-stamp, Gran's worn old bookmark, and every tale she has ever devoured, Nell has until teatime to catch the runaway stories and reshelve a villain before her town is edited into dull grey nothing.

A funny, warm-hearted adventure for anyone who loves brave heroines, bookish magic, and grumpy dragons. Open the door and start the adventure today.