Three years off the junk and making ends meet cleaning the bathrooms at a railway station, Ricky receives an envelope containing a two-line note and a bus ticket to Burlington, Vermont. A middle-aged black man, minding nobody's business but his own, he is stunned both by the destination  "the whitest state there is"  and the revelatory nature of the accompanying text. Four days later, he finds himself in a log cabin in the woods with six other petty criminals, waiting to be inducted into the mysterious work of the Washburn Library, an institution founded by a runaway slave two centuries before. Ricky is about to become a paranormal investigator, a task to which he finds he is suited  being one of the few survivors of a 1970s suicide cult. Winner of multiple awards in the States, LaValle's genre-bending novel fuses noir, horror and satire to penetrate the Big Machines of the American psyche  faith, status, identity. Like his spiritual forebears Chester Himes and Nelson Algren, he speaks for the unsung so we can hear their voice. Listen.