Kuchenga Shenjé’s The Library Thief came to my attention by way of The Transfeminine Review — I’m really grateful to Bethany Karsten for posting about it as she was reading it, because I don’t know if I would have stumbled on it or been inspired to pick it up otherwise, and I’m extremely glad I did. I’m going to try to discuss the novel without too many spoilers, or at least without too many specifics, because you should definitely go read it.
the novel follows Florence, a young woman raised (a charitable term) by her single father, a bookbinder in late 19th-century Manchester. having been kicked out for “promiscuity”, Florence intercepts a commission from a long-time client of her father’s and finds herself embroiled in a web of gothic mysteries surrounding her new employer’s estate, Rose Hall, and his recently deceased wife, who drowned under mysterious circumstances. for better or for worse, she’s drawn into the mystery: how did Persephone really die? along the way, she learns a great deal about Rose Hall’s past and present inhabitants: the widower landowner, the cruel younger brother and his suspiciously kind wife, the Black maid, the taciturn cook, the effete footman, the surly groom.
where to begin with this book. I was really impressed by basically everything about it, but I think the biggest thing, for me, is the way Shenjé has written Florence. she does an incredible job making Florence both recognizably “progressive” (I hesitate to say “leftist”, but its vagueness is perhaps appropriate here) from the perspective of a 21st-century reader while also clearly and convincingly grounding her in her social and historical context, with all the . Florence very clearly thinks of herself as a forward-thinking, modern woman, and in many respects she genuinely is, but the text also both confronts her with the limits of her open-mindedness — forcing her to reckon with her own failures to live up to her self-conception — and, through narrative details and offhand comments, foregrounds the ways her upbringing and social context have shaped her. one significant example is her attitudes towards “Africa”, which of course — being a British woman from 1896 — she treats as a unitary whole. while she is intellectually convinced that Africa is no more or less “civilized” than anywhere else, she consistently struggles to accept this on an emotional level. Shenjé has created an extremely compelling portrait of a woman who is trying to be better — she doesn’t always succeed, but she is trying, and that does make a difference.
another particular standout element of this book is the supporting characters, all of whom — with perhaps one deserved exception — are complex and multilayered. Florence’s interactions and relationships with them are what drive the narrative. again, Shenjé does an impressive job mediating these characters through Florence’s limited perspective: just when she thinks she’s figured each of them out — they appear initially to have a certain archetypal quality — she discovers something new that forces her to reevaluate her perceptions of them, deepenging the reader’s sense of the whole cast, some of whom remain mysterious even to the end of the novel. the one exception — deserved, as I said — is the man who rapes Florence, resulting in a pregnancy that shapes the second half of the novel; he remains something of a caricature, or perhaps an archetype.
the novel draws together sophisticated portrayals of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Shenjé is particularly interested, on the one hand, in the ways these forces are entangled and also, on the other hand, in the ways one or another force can be more determining of the shape of a given individual’s life. again, the cast of supporting characters is important here, allowing both Florence and — through her eyes and our own — the reader to perceive the operations of these various power structures and systems of oppression. one important subplot within the novel has to do with Florence’s coming into political consciousness. while the man she was involved with before being kicked out by her father was an anarchist, she becomes painfully aware as the novel continues that she had not fully grasped the stakes of political struggle and the many divergent experiences that shape different people’s political lives. while race and gender are, I would say, the overall focus, with a sensitive handling of sexuality (and its intersection with gender) as a major secondary throughline, parts of the novel are also particularly sharp about class, as Florence comes to realize that the landowners she works for — inheritors of wealth earned from slavery in the Caribbean — regard her first and foremost as a pawn in a game, such that her life can be arranged as they see fit with no input from her whatsoever.
I also want to shoutout to the novel’s actual attention to the mechanics of bookbinding. it’s not extensively detailed, but we do get a number of passages of Florence doing the work she is initially hired to perform, namely, rebinding some two hundred books in Lord Francis Belfield’s library, from modern novels to Greek classics to more unusual tomes: a West African Qur’an and a presumably-Ge’ez manuscript from Ethiopia. there are so many books whose protagonists have interesting professions that the author simply doesn’t engage with in more than a superficial way, so I really appreciated that Shenjé takes the time to show us Florence doing her job.
this is easily the best new book I’ve read in 2025 — I highly, highly recommend it.
(back: main page · reviews by author · reviews by country · other reviews from the UK)