The first day was a great shock as there was, what seemed to me, a row of Rolls-Royces, some with chauffeurs, depositing pupils. I recall overhearing my parents having a row about this and worrying that my dad wouldn’t like me anymore if I took up the scholarship. That is very perceptive! Yes, I did and my dad was very against my going. Did you have similar reservations about your time as a pupil attending St Paul’s Girls’ School?

In the novel, Marigold makes clear her reservations about being sent to St Catherine’s school for girls, fearing her classmates would all be “goody-goodies”. Her new book The Librarian (Viking, £16.99) follows Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman who moves to a small town to work as a children’s librarian and falls in love with an older man. Before writing novels she worked as a special educational needs teacher and a Jungian psychoanalyst. Most of all, however, it is a book about the ways in which reading can shape and foster a life.Born in Liverpool to communist parents, Vickers won a scholarship to attend private school before studying at Cambridge. Carrying echoes of Penelope Fitzgerland’s The Bookshop and Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it’s a book about love, education and the relationship between an individual and a community. How does the library alter the young children's lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to? A work of fiction that also reflects Salley Vicker’s own lifelong love of literature, The Librarian brims with references to favourite novels from childhood onwards (readers will appreciate the accompanying list of all the fiction mentioned in the book). Sylvia falls in love with an older man, but it is her connection to his precocious young daughter and her neighbours' son which will change her life, putting them, her job and the library itself under threat. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children's librarian. It is a hymn to the power of children’s literature.’ – The Times A charmingly subversive novel about a library in 1950s England, by the acclaimed author of The Cleaner of Chartres. Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for November 2018 ‘ will wring the heart of anyone who fell in love with books as a child.

The Librarian by Salley Vickers