Allen Eskens was driving to a library when he came up with the idea for his new book. The main character is, not surprisingly, a librarian.
Eskens, who lives in Cleveland, Minn., drives to a lot of libraries so he can’t recall which one it was, other than that it was in southeast Minnesota. But he does recall his thought process on the journey.
“I wanted to write about a protagonist, most likely female, who is middle-aged — kind of one of those invisible, blend-in-the-background people. Nobody knows this about her, but she has this incredible history," said Eskens, who created Bosnian American Hana Babić, a librarian in Farmington who is the title character in “The Quiet Librarian.”
Although she appears to be an ordinary person, Hana needed to have an extraordinary backstory, which Eskens discovered when he decided whatever happened to her would have happened in the 1990s. Researching world events, he found the violent Bosnian war from which Hana fled. Then, he sought out two Twin Cities residents who could help him understand the complexities of that war, in which even the way a person spelled their name could mark them for danger.
“One was a professor at the University of Minnesota, Erma Nezirević, who grew up in the Balkans during the war. The other one was a man from the Bosnian community in Minneapolis, Elvir Mujić. These two people were gracious enough to meet with me and talk to me about what it was like during the war,” said Eskens, whose last book was “Saving Emma.” “Their input really helped me understand who this character would have been in 1995.”
For example, said Eskens, “Unlike wars where you have a geographical line dividing one side from the other, this country had Serbians and Bosnians living next door to each other. They would know each others’ backgrounds by their names, and I have a character in the novel named Nura. Her name was originally Mora but I was told, ‘No, Mora is a non-Bosnian name.’ There was so much detail like that I didn’t know.”
Events from her youth in Bosnia, including the deaths of her family, come back to haunt Hana in “Quiet Librarian.” A friend of hers is killed and, while she tries to figure out who did it, dangerous men with a connection to the civil war seem to be hunting her and her friend’s young son, whom Hana is caring for.
Once he felt like he had a handle on Hana’s past, the Minnesota writer still had to discover how it was going to figure into the novel. Often, that meant knowing his research gave Hana humanity but that it wasn’t necessary to share all of it with readers. The more he wrote “Quiet Librarian,” the more Eskens edited out bits of research that were slowing down the book’s brisk pace.
