The Royal Librarian

Reviewed By  Janet Mawdesley       April 16, 2024

 

Author  Daisy Wood

Distributor:      Harper Collins Publishers
ISBN:                 978-0008636920
Publisher:         Harper Collins Publishers. Imprint Avon.
Release Date:   April 2024  

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Daisy Wood is without a doubt a fresh new voice in the genre of Historic Fiction with her third book, The Royal Librarian set between 1938 and 2021.

Set in Windsor Castle in 1940 the protagonist Sophie Klein has been placed in the Royal Library in order to search out any documentation from members of the Royal family, namely the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, known Nazi sympathisers, seemingly supporting the Nazi regime and the rise of Fascism in Britain.

Fast forward to 2021 in the days after COVID when Lacey Jones is facing her own personal crisis. She is summoned to a family gathering and dreads going, but while there inadvertently comes across a letter from Buckingham Palace and wonders what it is doing in her beloved Grandmothers desk.

As a ghost-writer of biographs her interest in piqued, so much so that she eventually decides to go to London to see if she can discover more about her Grandmother’s past and family, little knowing that she will also be on a journey that will push her to the very limits of her emotion strength.

Sophie Klein was, until the rise of Hitler and the surrender of Austria to the Germans in 1938, a happy young woman working with her father in the highly esteemed Austrian National Library. He was of Jewish decent, her mother a renowned pastry chef, was of British decent. 

She had witnessed her father beaten to death at the local park, her mother arrested, her home given to someone else and her security gone forever, forced to rely on anyone brave enough offer shelter to both her and her young sister.

A series of chance meetings sees her recruited for work in England, her sister sent to America for adoption and a new life beginning as she is admitted to work in the vast Libraries of Windsor Castle. 

At first she finds the job overwhelming, the cold unbearable and the staff standoffish as she is Austrian, an unknown considered as a possible imposter, but as she makes friends and relaxes she forms a delicate friendship with the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.

Sent to Frogmore Cottage to catalogue crates of papers sent back to Britain by the Duke of Windsor, she realises that someone has tampered with one of the crates. This incident brings home like nothing else, that she really is engaged in dangerous work, work which will eventually see her arrested and imprisoned.

The Royal Liberian is a well-constructed, well researched, fascinating return to a world of World War 2 intrigue involving people from all walks of life, but also captures a small microcosm of life inside the Royal household during the austerity of the War years. The historic content of the book presents another aspect of the early years of the ‘Anschluss in Vienna’, when brutally, destruction and hatred saw the beginning of rise of fascism throughout Europe.

The Royal Librarian is highly recommended for both its fiction and historic content which is s salient reminder in today’s world of the lessons history can and should teach.