Allen Eskens

Steve Thomas: Allen, welcome to the show. 

Allen Eskens: I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Steve Thomas: Before we get into the book, can you tell me a little bit about your personal experience with libraries either as a kid or now as an author or both? 

Allen Eskens: Yes, I think you’re gonna find that my answer to this question is different than most. I don’t recall going to a public library until I was in high school. I did not come from a family of readers. We didn’t have a bunch of books at home. My parents didn’t read to me that I recall, and so I didn’t grow up reading. And in fact, I always struggled with reading all my life. I can remember in first grade, reading aloud for that 1st time and realizing that I was the 2nd slowest reader in my class, and I was paralyzed with fear because I thought I was gonna get held back.

And so I really didn’t spend time in libraries, but my life changed. When I got into high school, I actually vowed that I was going to do nothing extracurricular. I was the kid that your parents didn’t want you to hang around with, and my best friend and I kind of dared each other to try out for the school play, which was called Oklahoma. I’d never heard of Oklahoma. I’d never seen a musical. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but we tried out, we got in, and I had a great time. I fell in love with theater and that’s when I discovered the public library because the public library had an enormous collection of albums, and I would go there and I was introduced to Sondheim, you know, Company, I was introduced to The Fantasticks, to Chorus Line, and I was checking out show tune albums as fast as I could and memorizing the songs.

It was my love of theater that propelled me to go to college. I wanted to keep doing theater. So I thought if I went to college, I could do theater. Got into college, found out that I could get around my issues with reading and turned out I graduated with a degree in journalism, went to law school, got my law degree, practiced law for 25 years, but I wanted to do something creative to scratch that itch that I had developed in theater, so that’s when I started writing.

And I wrote just for my own fun, just my own enjoyment. And when my first book, my debut novel came out, The Life We Bury, the very first bit of buzz came from the American Library Association. And I was incredibly excited. And then I would go online, and Google “The Life We Bury” and “library” just to see what new libraries were picking it up and putting it on the shelf after it came out. And now one of my favorite things in the world is to do library events. Minnesota has a wonderful library system, and they have grant programs that can bring in authors, and I have done hundreds of library events and I’m able to go to towns where the town is nothing more than a crossroad, and there’s a library there and speak and it was actually on the way to one of these library events that I came up with the idea for the novel, The Quiet Librarian.

Steve Thomas: Right. And that’s what mostly what we’re going to talk about here today. Can you tell listeners what The Quiet Librarian is about? And do you remember what that spark was in your head when you were on that trip home of that made you think of it?

Allen Eskens: I do. So I was killing time before I got in the car. It was about a two hour drive to this library, and I turned on the TV and there’s this movie called The Reader. I’d seen it before so I was watching it just in the background. And the movie has a character, the main character is a middle aged woman in, I think, Western Germany after the war. And you get to know her through the eyes of this young man who’s reading books to her. And for the first third of the movie, you see her a certain way and you feel an affinity toward her. And then you learn something about her, and it changes how you feel. It changes how you see her. 

And I get in my car and I’m driving to this library event. I’m thinking, and I daydream, that that’s really where my love of storytelling comes from. I’m a huge daydreamer. So I had this daydream. I was thinking, okay, if I were going to write a novel about a middle aged woman who had a secret past, what would it be? And by the time I got to the library event, I had a rough outline for this story and this character, and then on the drive home, I kind of finished it off and I knew what the story was going to be. 

And what I knew, in part, was that it was going to be a quiet woman, unassuming, someone who kind of blends into the background, and she’s fine with that. In fact, that’s what she likes, who has this incredible past that nobody knows about. And so I thought, okay, what would be that catalyst, that past? And I looked, you know, what, what was going on in the world 30 years ago? Well, there was a war in Bosnia, so I decided I was going to make that her backstory. She was forged by this war. Then I started researching the war in Bosnia. Now, I was alive when the war was going on. I saw it on the news. I knew so little about that event. As I’m researching, I realized that I’d bitten off more than I can chew. That this story was, this wasn’t just a backstory. What happened to her in Bosnia had to be half the story, and I also knew that I needed help. writing that part of the story. 

So I reached out to the University of Minnesota and also to the Bosniak community in Minneapolis. And I got two people respond to me who grew up in Bosnia during the war, and that changed this book so much. I sat down with them, talked to them about what it was like in that time being a teenager. And I realized that this backstory had to be told with reverence, that I had to make this a historical fiction. Half a novel was gonna be historical fiction, but based as close as I could on real events or real type events. And so I spent a lot of time with these two learning what it was like to be a Muslim, to be a female Muslim, to be a Bosnian during that time. And without them, I could not have written this book. So, when you open the book up, the first thing you see is the dedication to those two people, Erma and Elvir. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it’s interesting because the main character is Muslim, but she’s secular, like, they don’t go to the mosque. They don’t practice, but obviously within, once you learn more about what’s happening in Bosnia, you learn that that’s very important, and that people don’t care basically whether you’re secular or super religious. 

Allen Eskens: No, it was truly an ethnic cleansing because Bosnia was an area where you had cities that had Serbian people in it and Muslim, and this is one of the things that Elvir pointed out. He goes, in all these wars you see, you have a country versus a country. You have Croats versus Serbians. You have Kosovo’s. But in Bosnia, it was Serbian, a country, versus a people, the Muslim people, who are the Bosnians. And so it was an effort to get rid of the Muslims from the country and you had them in every city. So it wasn’t just a matter of here’s the border, one side’s fighting the other side. It was town by town, street by street, neighbor by neighbor, and it was a very dangerous place to live. 

One of the things that I learned early on was names are important. That you knew if you were Serbian or Bosnian Muslim by the name. So I had a name in there initially for one of my characters and Erma said, “You know, that that’s actually a Serbian name. You would need to have a different name for that person.” And so I had to be very careful with the names I chose and just the way neighbor turned on neighbor so quickly… so it was really the Serbian Belgrade government trying to get rid of the Muslim people from this area. 

Steve Thomas: And obviously the “quiet librarian” role is something she’s constructed later in her life, but when she’s younger, her whole family is trying to live this quiet life, off to the side. Her father doesn’t want to get involved with the war, like, just let us live here in the mountains. We’re not bothering anybody. We’re not doing anything. But one of the themes of the book is that war will come for you all. You can’t escape this kind of thing. 

Allen Eskens: Exactly. And one of the things that my character’s father, he’s a Mason, he just wants to build his houses and be left alone and he raises cattle and his brother says it doesn’t work that way. The war will find you. And it did. 

Steve Thomas: And you know, we don’t want to give away too many spoiler thing here, but she does eventually get more and more involved with the war because at first it’s not happening at all and then Yugoslavia is breaking up and you know, I know it did happen, but it’s so odd to go back and think now that the Olympics were there in just, what, 1984? Yeah, and it’s like, it was stable enough to have a big international event like that, and then less than 10 years later, it’s in this genocide, basically.

Allen Eskens: It is. And I wanted to make sure I pointed that out in I think, like, the second and third chapter, that they had the Olympics there and they were so proud. Tito, the dictator, held that country together. When he died, everybody said, “Well, we’re leaving. See ya!” And it just went into chaos. But yeah, 84, the Olympics, you had Torval and Dean skating to Bolero that became very famous, and just less than a decade later, you had massacres in Srebrenica and Tuzla and places like that. 

Steve Thomas: And there’s that duality of her personality that she’s constructed, but it was almost like a tragedy happens to her obviously early in the book and it forces a change in her. But then when she comes to the US, she constructs this other kind of identity that even so much that the kids around are just, “Oh, that’s the sweater lady.” She’s trying to blend in and look as unassuming as possible, but it does come back to haunt her because then there’s a death that once she starts investigating, she realizes may be tied into what happened in Bosnia. 

Allen Eskens: Yes. So story begins with her best friend falling or getting pushed from a balcony, and Hana, the quiet librarian, realizes or believes that someone from her past has come looking for her. This is not, I don’t think, giving away too much of a spoiler, but she is thrust into the war, and in that role as a militia fighter, she becomes something of a legend, and she has to flee Bosnia, and she’s kind of been hiding here in the U. S. when the book begins with the death of her friend.

Steve Thomas: Did your does your background as a journalist or a criminal defense attorney, did that influence how you wrote this book? 

Allen Eskens: Probably the journalist part, just the research. My other nine books are all mystery thrillers. While this is a mystery, it is more historical fiction mystery, which is a first for me, but when I was in journalism school at the University of Minnesota, one of the things that I love the most was learning how to research. And that was before the Internet. That’s how old I am. So we learned to research old school. And delving into this Bosnian war and that world, I spent a lot of time researching that to try and understand it. And it is very confusing, but I think I have a much better appreciation for it now. 

Steve Thomas: The book basically, it goes back and forth between chapters of Bosnia during the war and then Minnesota. Did you have to outline that out to make everything line up? Just craft-wise, how do you work that out? 

Allen Eskens: I’m a big outliner. I’m a big believer in outlines. And this book was a difficult book to outline. Because I didn’t want to just have, story from the 90s, story from present, 90s, present, and go back and forth. I wanted to have a connection.

So what I did was I outlined the story from the past first. And I had plot points for all the things that were going to happen in the past, and I laid them out on post-it notes on a table. Then I created post-it notes for all of the plot points that I knew I needed for the present. And I just sat there and kept arranging and rearranging so that there’d be a connection. So in the past, when the character uses a knife for the first time, in the present, she goes into a pawn shop and buys a knife. And she’s thinking back to that knife that she had before. And so there’s a connection between chapters as I go.

And that was hard to do and it took a long time, but I have a picture on my phone. When I finally got it, I took a picture of the table with all these post-it notes just in case somebody knocked the table or scattered the post-it notes. But yeah, I’m a big believer in outlines. I can visualize the story from beginning to end and have these plot points in front of me and I can see the whole story. Then I sit down and go to writing it. 

Steve Thomas: And I guess “vengeance” is the right word is a big part of the story. Did you find it hard to, when you’re writing her story, she’s doing a lot of very brutal things in the name of vengeance, of keeping her likeable when she’s doing these horrific acts for a good reason, but you have to show that reasoning to keep her as a likable character. 

Allen Eskens: Yeah, so there are heroes and there are antiheroes. Antihero is someone who does a bad thing, but has a good reason behind it. So it was just a matter of creating her and letting the reader experience what she experienced so that they would then understand why she takes the steps she takes. And if the reader doesn’t necessarily agree, at least they understand. 

There are people that are what I call a talisman. A talisman kind of transports you from one place to another, from one time of the story to another. So in this story, when she takes over custody of her friend’s grandson, that child becomes a talisman and it transports her back to those days when she had a little brother that age and all the pain that she experienced from that relationship and what happened. And now she transfers that to this new child and so again, connects the past to the present. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, because a lot of her identity that she’s made is to hide literally from people who are hunting her, but also almost a protective cocoon for herself as well, where she’s trying to just not have to think about that past, but this brings it back into sharp relief again, where she has to confront it all again. 

Allen Eskens: Yeah, so her friend who died, her name’s Amina. Amina also escaped Bosnia and the two have different ways of dealing with it. Amina, because she had family or a child, at least, she felt she needed to get past it. Hana, on the other hand, just walled herself off. She didn’t want to get past it. She didn’t want to get over because she thought if I get over it, I’m going to lose that memory and that love. And so she kind of wallows in the past for 30 years. So the story is also her dealing with having walled herself off from the world.

Steve Thomas: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers who were looking at this type of story of how to tackle those both historical and emotional themes in a respectful way? 

Allen Eskens: Yeah. Do your research. Like I said, I was very lucky to find those two people to help me. This story would not be what it is without them. And I think back to a day when I was talking to one of my sources and the way she told her story about being pulled from school and taken to a place where she believed she was going to be executed with her other Muslim classmates, and then only to have that plan fall apart because a Spanish journalist happened to hear that something was going on and showed up. And when that Spanish journalist showed up, they took the kids back to school. 

And she’s telling me this story with all the calmness of me talking about having getting stung by a bee when I was a kid, and I’m just sitting there amazed. There are people in the world who have lived extraordinary lives, and the fact that I get to tell a fictional story, but one that represents their journeys, I saw that I had to write it with reverence and sincerity and authenticity.

Steve Thomas: And do you think fictionalizing things like this can help readers process these kinds of issues? Like, being able to follow Hana’s story here can help us number one, learn about Bosnia and also maybe process what happened there a little easier. 

Allen Eskens: That’s one of the things that I’m seeing from the early reviews, like on Goodreads almost to a person they’re saying, “I was around then I had no idea. I didn’t know this stuff was going on. I learned a lot, very appreciative.” So, yeah, I do think historical fiction, when you are true to what happened can be very valuable to teach lessons and teach history. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and the detective character is sort of our stand in for that kind of person who didn’t, I mean, he lots of other roles he has in the book, but that’s one of them is that Hana can explain things to him because he doesn’t know anything about that past. You do a very good job, I think, of explaining, obviously there’s much more depth to it that you could go into, but explaining the basics of what’s going on there. 

Allen Eskens: Yeah, I focused just on the Bosnian part of it, but there was Slovenia, Croatia, Kosovo, Albania, all these other breakaways that were fighting against Belgrade, but also fighting against each other. Croatia at one point was fighting against Bosnia, but then turned around and became an ally of Bosnia, so it was very confusing. But yeah, so the detective, is really a stand in for me, my understanding of that time. I’d heard the name Milosevic, I’ve heard the countries of Kosovo and Croatia, but I really didn’t have a good understanding of how that fell apart and how that war happened until I started doing this research.

There was a massacre that happened in  Srebrenica, 8,000 men and boys, when the city fell, and one of my sources was fighting in the trenches of Srebrenica. And he saw the helicopters come in and take the generals away, so he knew the city was about to fall. So he and a friend swam the river and got into Serbia. They actually swam away from the Bosnian areas and surrendered and they were put in a prison of war camp. But when the city fell, the Serbs came in and took thousands of men and boys out to the woods and just shot them. And I was alive, and I was like, I think I have a vague recollection of something like that being talked about in the news, but yeah, it really hit home when I was doing this research.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and that’s an amazing story there, too, of just the fact that they did that, escaped in that way, they’re still in custody, which it wasn’t a great situation, but they weren’t in the city then and would have been killed at that point.

Allen Eskens: And he had no idea if he was going to live or die. They swam the river, they got put into a prisoner of war camp. It was more like a prison, actual prison, he said, and every day he would wake up thinking, “Is today the day I’m going to be shot?” And then one day they came, took him out of his cell, put him in a truck and okay, he’s thinking this is the end. He gets out of the truck at an airport. And they fly him back to Bosnia, and he’s like, “What just happened?” He had no clue, and then that’s when he found out that his friends and I think he had some cousins in Srebrenica who did not survive. 

Steve Thomas: Well, that’s why I think it can be helpful, like that story kind of helps you understand, and then using Hana as a avatar, basically, to follow through and learn about this stuff too that’s sometimes the best way to learn about this stuff. 

So I did want to ask one quick, last two questions I know you said you came late to reading and such, but do you remember what the first book that you read is that you really fell in love with?

Allen Eskens: Yes Where the Red Fern Grows So there’s only a couple books that I read in middle school and high school that I actually read from beginning to end, and that was one of the first and I think it’s because I grew up in the Ozarks. I grew up in the woods. And so I related to this kid in that book, and there’s a part in the book, if you read the book, you know what I’m talking about, where you cry. And I got so angry. It’s like, this is just ink on paper. Why are you crying? And so I finished the book and then a couple of weeks later, I read it again. I had never read a book twice. And I read it again just because I wanted to prove to myself that I wouldn’t cry at that one point. And no, I did not succeed. I cannot read that book without getting emotional and tearing up. So that was the first time that I realized that words on paper can really have an impact even if you know it’s not true. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah. I read Old Yeller when I was a kid and had never heard anything about what happens at the end. And so, I was like, “Whaaaat?” 

Allen Eskens: There should be a surgeon general warning on books like that. 

Steve Thomas: And then what are you reading now that you’re enjoying or what’s the last good thing that you read? 

Allen Eskens: So I just finished All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. It’s a book that takes place in Missouri, Chris Whitaker’s most recent book. 

Steve Thomas: All right. Well thank you so much for coming on the podcast and letting us know about the book. I very much enjoyed it. I think listeners will enjoy it. And the book again, it is the Quiet Librarian. And yes, there are parts in the libraries, so library listeners, there are parts that you can read and go, “That’s just like what I do!” So and it’s available now. So go get a copy wherever fine books are sold or check it out at your local library, and if your local library doesn’t have it, ask them to purchase it and then it’s still a purchase and Alan still gets that little bit of money. So Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Allen Eskens: I greatly appreciate you having me. Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

* * * * *

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to another edition of the Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the executive director at Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat, a Novelist librarian. 

Rebecca Vnuk: So today’s episode, we are talking about The Quiet Librarian by Allen Eskens. And the first thing that I wanted to just get out of the way is, as a woman of a certain age, it’s a little bit distressing for me to realize that the 80s and 90s are now considered historical fiction. But we’re just gonna run with that. I knew that there would always come a point in time where, if I stayed in the library world long enough that yes, my experiences would become historical fiction, but I’m not quite ready for that yet. 

But looking at read-alikes for this title, I started to look for things that kind of hammered home that “secrets of the past” element to the Quiet Librarian. I think there’s a lot of different ways you could go with this one for readers’ advisory. You could definitely pick things that have to do like the whole war scenario is a big element of this story. This kind of going back into the past, kind of running from your past. And that’s what I chose to make read-alikes on because that is an element of stories that I like.

I love the idea of someone running away and 20 years later being discovered, and all of this stuff. So the books that I chose as good read-alikes for this, the first one is The Return of Ellie Black, and I picked this one because I thought the whole kind of like, “secrets in the past” and all that was very much the appeal here. And what I can tell you about this one is this was on our May 2024 Library Reads list. And our annotation is, “Teenager Ellie disappears and is found in a state park over two years later, battered and dazed and refusing to cooperate. Police detective Chelsea Calhoun has been on the chase from the beginning and has her own past to deal with but becomes determined to find out who Ellie may be trying to protect. A gripping thriller with plenty of twists.” So this is Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean. 

And then the other one that I wanted to pick was Long Bright River by Liz Moore. And that was on our January 2020 Library Reads list, and it’s got more of the police procedural going on to this kind of thing. Like, our main character is a detective and she is looking for answers to why her sister has become a heroin addict. And there’s all kinds of secrets and lies and all kinds of stuff. We go back and forth, past and present, so I thought that would be kind of a good match for that. So our annotation on that is, “A compelling literary police story. Procedural set in an opioid ravaged Philadelphia neighborhood centered on the relationship between two sisters whose lives have taken opposite paths. Your heart will ache as you grow to love the complex, strong, and incredibly vulnerable characters. For readers of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.” So I thought that was kind of a good match up for the Allen Eskens book. How about you, Yaika? 

Yaika Sabat: So I went digging in Novelist. And I did want to have at least one read-alike with a librarian because as we know, books with books, books with librarians are super popular.

And the one that came to mind first for me actually was How Can I Help You? by Laura Sims, which came out in 2023. Now this I will say the mood for this one is more menacing and suspenseful, while Quiet Librarian is a bit more like bleak, emotionally intense, violent. But they both center on librarians with secret lives. And these lives sort of come to the forefront after a death. In the Quiet Librarian, it is after the death of her best friend, and she has the secret life of being sort of this warrior in the Bosnian army. And in How Can I Help You?, it’s actually kind of two librarians: one of whom is on the run, she sort of secretly has a past as a nurse, and the other discovers a patron in the library and starts to become suspicious of her co worker. So you’ve got two librarians in How Can I Help You?: one sort of investigating the co worker, and the other one who is trying to stay hidden and has kind of a sinister past. So I do think that those have a lot of common threads and of course, the library angle. 

Rebecca Vnuk: Very good pick on that one. That’s an excellent match.

And then I went a little further back. I did, like you, I really liked the idea of sort of someone’s past and their secrets and how that interacts and potentially damages the current life they set up for themselves. And so when I was looking, I came across Long Black Veil by Jennifer Finney, which is actually from 2017. In this one, the body of a college friend of the main character, Judith, is discovered 20 years after they disappeared. And there is a chief suspect in the case, which is one of Judith’s other friends. Judith is the only one who can testify to the innocence of this person. But to do so would put the life she’s built for herself and her family at risk. And so there is that tension of wanting to protect your family, which you also see in The Quiet Librarian with her wanting to protect her grandson, but also wanting to discover the truth and help a friend who is in danger. They both have an intricate plot. They both have sympathetic characters. I will say Long Back Veil also has LGBTQIA and transgender characters and they both deal with the risk of your past sort of wrecking your present. So it’s really interesting. 

I like that we both, like, that was the appeal thing that stuck out to both of us, is that the past coming back to inform your present. And I think that is definitely, there’s a lot of readers that like that. That’s why there’s a lot of books to pick from.

Yaika Sabat: And I think with the Quiet Librarian, there’s a lot of routes you could take. I mean, you can do the thriller suspense, you can do secrets, you can really ask that reader what they liked. Did they like the violent sort of bleak tone? Do they want something a little different? Or even did they like the insight into the Bosnian war? Because there may not be thrillers or suspense novels with that, but there could be other novels. Maybe they read this and they become really curious about that angle. So that, I think, is another tip. This one has a lot of pieces, so I would say really ask the reader what their favorite thing was about this book. 

Rebecca Vnuk: Definitely, definitely. That is, that’s really excellent readers’ advisory advice for sure. And for sure, you know the Library Reads list, of course, has a ton of books with librarian in the title. So they like that part of it, like right away, I’m thinking of like the oh no, I can’t remember the Canadian author, academic librarian. I know she’s published by Sourcebooks. Eva Jurczyk! We could just do a whole list of books about bad things happening to the library. We need to mark that off. 

So well, that’s great. I think we’ve given some really good title matches for this. I love the readers’ advisory advice that you just gave. So I think that we’ll close up the Circ Desk at this point and we will check you out later!