By Margot Harrison
On Sale: December 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781525804311
Graydon House Hardcover
Price: $30.00
Buy Links:
HarperCollins: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-library-of-fates-margot-harrison?variant=43819432935458
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1525804316
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-library-of-fates-margot-harrison/1146730878
BookShop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-library-of-fates-margot-harrison/df8857ce86f517ae?ean=9781525804311
Social Links:
Author Website: https://margotharrison.com/
X: https://x.com/MargotFHarrison/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/margotfharrison/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14215617.Margot_Harrison
About the Book:
When its librarian keeper mysteriously
dies, two former classmates must race to locate a rare book from their college
years that can foretell your future if you confess a secret from your past—but
someone is intent on protecting what’s hidden inside.
It can write the story of your future... and hide the secrets of your past
The Library of Fates was designed to show you who you are—and who you
could become. Its rarest book, The Book of Dark Nights, holds a
secret: when you write an intimate confession on its pages, you'll receive a
prediction for your future, penned in your own handwriting.
For Eleanor, whose childhood was defined by a senseless tragedy, the library
offers a world where everything makes sense. She’s spent most of her life there
as an apprentice to the brilliant librarian, showing other people how to find
the meaning of their lives in stories.
But when her mentor dies in a freak accident and The Book of Dark
Nights goes missing—along with the secrets written inside—Eleanor is
pulled out of the library and into a quest to locate it with the last person
she expects: the librarian’s estranged son, Daniel, who Eleanor once loved.
Together, as they hunt down clues from Harvard to Paris, Eleanor and
Daniel grow closer again, regaining each other’s trust. But little do they know
that they’re entangled in a much larger web. Someone else wants the book, and
they'll go to dark lengths to get it...
About the Author:
MARGOT HARRISON is the author of The Midnight Club and The Library of Fates. She is also the author of four young adult novels, including an Indies Introduce Pick, Junior Library Guild Selections, and Vermont Book Award Finalists. She grew up in New York and now lives in Vermont.
Excerpt:
Now
September
26, 2019, 1:15 p.m.
The Library of Fates lived tucked
under the mansarded roof of a tall, charcoal- gray building in Harvard Yard. To
a casual visitor, it was like any other library, lined with shelves for hours
of pleasantly aimless browsing. But every student knew that if you came to the
Library of Fates and asked for a book to guide you safely through turbulent
times, the librarian would go straight to the shelf and put a book in your
hands. And that book would change your life.
Eleanor Dennet was that librarian
now, but the knowledge felt hollow. Her predecessor, Odile Vernet— her mentor,
her guiding star, her best friend— had died suddenly three days ago, and she
could barely process it.
Her throat still raw from crying, her
brain still woozy from too much vodka, she stepped over the threshold of the
library that had been her refuge for most of the past twenty-four years. On the
surface, everything seemed the same: the dark oak paneling and moss- green area
rugs and accents; the pearly glow that came through the recessed skylight; the
sweet, faintly musty smell. The custodian had opened the curtains and blinds of
the nine bay windows on each long side of the room. Sunlight bathed the books
in a greenish haze and washed over the varnished seminar table and armchairs.
The mural on the ceiling evoked the magic of stories.
But
something felt different here. Something was wrong.
Then
Eleanor saw him.
From his seat in a green brocade
armchair angled toward the window, he didn’t seem to have noticed her entrance.
Barely daring to breathe, she took in black hair sprinkled with gray on the
headrest and long lashes outlined on his cheek as he gazed down at a sheaf of
papers in his hand.
Daniel Vernet, Odile’s son.
The last time they’d seen each other,
in 1995, they’d been standing here in the library. Eleanor’s view of Daniel had
been clouded by tears, but she would never forget his dark eyes gazing back as
if she were a stranger. The bland way he’d smiled, as if she meant nothing to
him after everything they’d been through.
And here were more damned tears,
rising and choking her. She would have to face Daniel eventually, to give
condolences and make arrangements for his mother’s memorial. But not yet. She
wasn’t ready for that. She darted to the window bay farthest from his chair,
silent on the thick carpet, and slipped behind the floor-length curtain.
Daniel sighed heavily. The papers
crackled. Frozen in place, Eleanor watched through a gap as he stood up. He
didn’t look his age, the lines of his chin and cheekbones still firm.
A sharp click- clack of heels sounded
on the stairs behind them. “Ready, Daniel?” asked a slightly accented voice
that Eleanor recognized as Liliana, Odile’s housekeeper and close friend.
Daniel nodded, but his gaze was still
on the papers. “What the hell is this?” he asked. “What the hell?”
As the older woman put a soothing
hand on Daniel’s shoulder, Eleanor saw his body heave. Was he grieving his
mother, then? Their relationship had never been smooth. Though Odile visited her
son in Europe on occasion, it had taken her death to bring him back to the
States for the first time in decades.
Liliana gave Daniel a hug and led him
toward the door. “Everything will work out. You’ll see. We don’t want to be
late for our appointment.”
“I’m just so confused!” Eleanor heard
him still exclaiming as their feet thudded down the stairs.
She emerged from behind the curtain
and stood very still, waiting for the tension to dissipate and the atmosphere
to settle. Listening for a faint but steady thrum on the edge of her awareness,
a rumble that was neither pipes nor heating. Like Odile, Eleanor was attuned to
the library’s vibrations, inaudible to most people.
But now, standing dead center in the
library, straining her senses in the stillness, she detected no reassuring
thrum. Nothing. As if the library were an immense machine that had stopped
running.
Panic
gripped her. It can’t be.
She hurried to the oak door at the
far end of the room and unlocked it with trembling fingers. Here in the
librarian’s small office, The Book of Dark Nights was kept, secure in a safe,
its pages alive with the power of the secrets trapped inside, for the library
drew its power from the Book. As long as the Book remained there, the library
would function.
On top of the safe, she found a
sticky note in Odile’s strong cursive:
A place of pages,
A subterranean secret,
Where love is shared.
One book brought you
together.
Start from there.
Eleanor stared at it for a dazed
second. Odile often left literary quotes on sticky notes, but this didn’t seem
like the style of poetry she would read— or write, if Odile had been a poet.
Then she knelt beside the safe to
type in the code. Fumbling in her urgency, she had to enter it twice before the
light turned green and she could swing the door open. Eleanor closed her eyes
and said a silent prayer: Please let it be here.
The Book had been stolen only once,
and the results had been disastrous. Eleanor tried not to think about them as
she reached into the safe for the cracked calfskin of the Book’s binding,
bracing herself to feel the usual tingle as her fingers made contact. Needing to
experience that uncanny suggestion that the Book was alive. To know that it was
only Daniel’s presence that had made the library feel wrong.
But there was nothing.
She knew people saw her as Odile’s
mousy, adoring acolyte, hidden away in the library like a relic herself. A
perennial student who had never even finished her PhD. A wan spinster, a living
history display. Here in the library was the one place Eleanor mattered. In
these books is your future, Odile had told her long ago. In these books are
all the tools you need to live your life to the fullest. But all that depended
on the magic.
And as she ran shaky fingers from
corner to corner of the steel compartment, she found only shadows and a fine,
powdery dust that came off on her fingertips.
The Book of Dark Nights was gone.
Excerpted from THE LIBRARY OF FATES by Margot
Harrison, Copyright © 2025 by Margot Harrison. Published by Graydon House, an
imprint of HarperCollins.
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