Brendan Duffy’s debut novel, HOUSE OF ECHOES, has already received starred reviews in both Booklist and Kirkus, been compared to Jennifer McMahon’s The Winter People, and earned a coveted spot on the April LibraryReads list.
This National Library Week, Duffy returns the love, thanking libraries and librarians for their role in his young life:
I had an itinerant childhood. By sixth grade, I’d moved from New York to Hong Kong to Istanbul to Frankfurt to New Jersey. The older I got, the more harrowing these moves became. Settling into suburban New Jersey after nearly a decade of living abroad was tough. I’d never heard of New Kids on the Block or Bon Jovi. I didn’t wear the right shoes or own a Hypercolor t-shirt. I’d been in Europe, but might as well have come from Mars. Everything was different. Everything but the middle school library. Asimov was still only a couple shelves from Clarke. Brooks was still within sight of Eddings. My school’s librarian was kind and generous in the way that one book lover is to another. A gentle nudge to Brin. A casual comment about Herbert. It wasn’t a big library, but it contained thousands of lives and hundreds of worlds.
Eventually, I made friends. I even got a Hypercolor t-shirt that classmates would run cross the hall to puff their breath into. But none of this kept me from the library. I devoured that place, and I treasure my memories of it. This was where I learned that with good books and a quiet place, readers like us are never far from home.”
Click to Read an Excerpt of HOUSE OF ECHOES.
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