![]() At first, her efforts to attract East Mole’s children into the library are successful, thanks in part to the support of the Women’s Institute and her overtures to local teachers. ![]() Aged just twenty-four and a graduate of one of the new library schools, Sylvia is evangelical about the importance of reading for children. Vickers’s heroine, Sylvia Blackwell, arrives at East Mole, a ‘small middle-English country town’, in the spring of 1958 to take up the post of children’s librarian. It is set in the late 1950s, when the Second World War was a recent memory, and success or failure in the eleven plus examination determined the future prosperity of children in state education. ![]() A t a time when library services are being reduced all over Britain, Salley Vickers’s new novel, The Librarian, inspired by a ‘remarkable’ librarian whom she knew as a child, is testimony to the lifelong influence of childhood reading. ![]()
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