Alison Joseph, Shadow of Death

A mystery-solving nun this time – might the formula of the crime fiction genre be getting ever so slightly stretched? Even better, it’s a nun with problems with her superior (so to speak) so ticking one of the boxes on my personal list of essential characteristics of crime fiction. And, tick number 2, she’s sorting through an archive and library collection (okay, so that one is a little specialist).

Readable stuff, even if I got slightly distracted by the constant concentration upon good food and eating (it was after all a nun who had lived in France), and the fairly lax approach to attendance of religious observance.

 

Libraries and archives on the frontline

When I used to tell people that I was an archivist (and then explained what that was…), people used to comment how nice and peaceful such a job must be. Not so for the Director of the National Library and Archive of Iraq, Saad Eskander. In a recent interview with the BBC World Service, he described getting death threats, staff being tortured and trips into dangerous parts of the city to rescue key collections of books and documents. It was truly inspiring to hear his perspective on the role of archives and libraries in supporting cultural and democratic development, and about his staff’s work to rescue books, such as Jewish literature, that had been repressed under Saddam Hussein.

More detail is available from Dr Eskander’s diary, hosted on the British Library’s website.