The Last Library of Alexandria

In 2042, a boy asks how many people died.The machine says no verified source meets the confidence threshold for his query. It is not lying. The record exists - catalogued perfectly, in a carton in a municipal depot - and has been made unreachable by a data-protection settlement, a custodial flag and a retention schedule, each of them defensible, none of them a crime.Mara Voss is a school librarian in Prague. She has days before the cellar under her school is cleared, and weeks before Europe votes to relieve every public body of the duty to keep its originals. What she finds on a spliced reel of microfilm carries her from Prague to Venice, Sarajevo, Athens, Istanbul and Alexandria - through a network of archivists who have spent their lives writing down the things their catalogues had no field for - and into the papers of the father she never asked about.Nobody in this story is a villain. That is the problem.A record nobody can reach isn't preserved. It's stored.A literary thriller about memory, custody and the quiet arithmetic by which a society forgets.