Gilly Macmillan ventures into provocative new territory with The Burning Library, weaving a complex tapestry of academic intrigue, feminist ideology, and historical mystery that feels both intellectually ambitious and viscerally thrilling. Known for her psychological suspense novels including The Nanny and What She Knew, Macmillan shifts gears here, creating a dark academia thriller that asks uncomfortable questions about power, methodology, and the price women pay for advancement in a world still shaped by patriarchal structures.
The Burning Library opens with a body discovered on the windswept shores of Scotland’s Western Hebrides—Eleanor Bruton, a seemingly ordinary middle-aged woman whose secret life studying a medieval embroidery fragment sets in motion a deadly game spanning centuries. This quiet opening belies the labyrinthine conspiracy that follows, one involving rival organizations of women, a priceless lost manuscript, and the ruthless lengths people will travel for knowledge and control.
A Protagonist Worth Following
Dr. Anya Brown emerges as the novel’s beating heart—a brilliant young paleographer who has just achieved international recognition for decoding a cryptic medieval manuscript. Macmillan crafts Anya with admirable nuance, presenting her as genuinely gifted yet plagued by impostor syndrome, devoted to her cancer-stricken mother while wrestling with abandonment by her famous father. When the enigmatic Professor Diana Cornish recruits Anya to join the exclusive Institute of Manuscript Studies in St. Andrews, the position appears too perfect to refuse.
What distinguishes Anya from countless thriller protagonists is her authentic scholarly passion. Macmillan captures the genuine thrill of academic discovery—the way Anya’s visual memory allows her to connect disparate historical details, her methodical approach to translation, her reverence for ancient texts. This isn’t merely window dressing; it’s essential to understanding why Anya becomes entangled in something far more dangerous than she imagined.
The Architecture of Conspiracy
The novel’s central conceit—two secret organizations of women locked in centuries-old conflict—proves both fascinating and occasionally frustrating. The Order of St. Katherine believes women should exercise power by influencing powerful men from traditional roles as wives and mothers. The Fellowship of the Larks, conversely, champions women shattering glass ceilings and claiming overt positions of authority. Both groups will kill to achieve their objectives.
Macmillan deserves credit for exploring the ideological tensions between different feminist approaches without offering easy answers. The Larks’ methods seem more progressive on the surface, yet they prove equally ruthless and manipulative. The Kats’ traditional approach appears regressive, yet their members demonstrate strategic brilliance and unwavering commitment. The novel forces readers to confront uncomfortable questions about whether ends justify means, whether any methodology that requires secrecy and violence can truly advance women’s causes.
However, this ambitious framework occasionally buckles under its own weight. The conspiracy stretches credibility at times—the reach and resources of both organizations seem implausibly vast for groups that have supposedly operated in near-total secrecy for centuries. The novel sometimes struggles to maintain consistent rules about what these organizations can and cannot accomplish, leading to moments where plot convenience trumps logical consistency.
Detective Work and Dual Narratives
Detective Clio Spicer provides the novel’s investigative backbone, pursuing connections between Eleanor Bruton’s death and warnings from her murdered mentor about dangerous women’s groups. Macmillan structures the narrative through multiple perspectives—Anya, Clio, various members of both organizations—creating a kaleidoscope effect that gradually reveals the conspiracy’s scope.
This multi-POV approach proves both strength and weakness. On one hand, it generates genuine suspense as readers piece together information characters don’t yet possess. The alternating viewpoints create propulsive momentum, with each chapter ending on hooks that compel continued reading. Macmillan demonstrates skill in maintaining distinct voices—Anya’s scholarly precision differs markedly from Clio’s procedural thinking and the cold calculation of various antagonists.
On the other hand, the proliferation of perspectives occasionally dilutes narrative focus. Some chapters feel like information dumps rather than organic character moments. Certain secondary characters blur together, particularly among the Fellowship and Order members who appear briefly to advance plot mechanics. The novel might have benefited from a tighter focus on its primary trio of Anya, Clio, and perhaps one senior member from each organization.
The Voynich Manuscript Mystery
At the story’s core lies The Burning Library’s most intriguing element—a fictional solution to the real-world Voynich manuscript mystery. For readers unfamiliar with this famous enigma, the Voynich is an actual medieval codex written in an undeciphered script, filled with bizarre botanical illustrations and baffling diagrams that have stumped cryptographers and scholars for centuries.
Macmillan’s premise—that the manuscript was created by educated Renaissance women as an encrypted guide to finding an even more valuable text—feels simultaneously audacious and weirdly plausible. She grounds her fiction in real historical figures like the poet Isotta Nogarola and real locations in Verona, blending fact and invention with considerable skill. The sections where Anya decodes clues and follows them through Italian streets demonstrate Macmillan’s research and her ability to make intellectual pursuit genuinely exciting.
For mystery purists and history enthusiasts, these sequences offer substantial rewards. Macmillan doesn’t merely use the Voynich as McGuffin—she engages seriously with questions about women’s intellectual contributions to history, the deliberate erasure of female achievement, and how knowledge itself becomes a weapon in gender conflicts. The novel works hardest and best when focused on this scholarly treasure hunt.
Pacing and Plot Mechanics
The novel’s momentum proves uneven. The first third moves deliberately, establishing characters and conspiracy framework with patient detail. Some readers may find this setup too slow, particularly given the abundance of characters requiring introduction and the complex historical backstory needing explanation. However, this methodical groundwork pays dividends later.
The middle section accelerates dramatically when Anya and her partner Sid flee Scotland for Italy, with danger closing from multiple directions. These sequences pulse with genuine tension—abductions, near-misses, desperate decoding sessions in borrowed apartments while enemies circle. Macmillan excels at maintaining multiple threat levels simultaneously, ensuring readers never feel secure.
The final act brings revelations, confrontations, and a resolution that attempts to tie numerous threads together. Without spoiling specific plot points, the ending feels both rushed and oddly tidy for a story dealing with centuries of deadly conflict. Certain antagonists receive convenient comeuppances, while the ultimate disposition of key characters and organizations raises more questions than it answers. Some readers will find this openness satisfying, allowing them to ponder the moral implications. Others may feel cheated of more definitive closure.
Writing Style and Atmosphere
Macmillan’s prose proves workmanlike rather than lyrical—clear, efficient, occasionally vivid but rarely beautiful. She prioritizes story over style, which suits a thriller’s requirements but means few passages linger in memory for their language alone. Descriptions tend toward functional rather than evocative, though she effectively captures the Gothic atmosphere of St. Andrews’ medieval streets and Verona’s layered history.
The dialogue occasionally creaks under exposition’s weight, with characters explaining things they would already know for readers’ benefit. However, Macmillan generally handles information distribution well, understanding when to reveal and when to withhold. The academic elements feel authentic—someone clearly did considerable research into paleography, medieval manuscripts, and bookbinding techniques.
Themes Worth Unpacking
Beyond its thriller mechanics, The Burning Library grapples with substantial questions about female power and agency. The novel refuses to offer simple answers about whether ends justify means or whether any single approach to feminist advancement proves “correct.” Both organizations commit terrible acts while genuinely believing they serve women’s interests.
This moral ambiguity distinguishes the novel from simpler thrillers with clear heroes and villains. Even antagonists possess comprehensible motivations rooted in legitimate grievances about systemic misogyny. The Fellowship’s ruthless pursuit of institutional power and the Order’s strategic manipulation of powerful men both emerge from rational responses to limited options historically available to women.
The Burning Library also explores how knowledge itself becomes contested territory. Who deserves access to rare manuscripts? Should private collectors hoard treasures or should important texts remain public? Can secrecy ever serve progressive ends? These questions resonate beyond the immediate plot.
Comparative Context
Readers who enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches will find familiar territory here—academia concealing dangerous secrets, historical mysteries with contemporary relevance, intellectual pursuits turning deadly. The novel also shares DNA with Kate Morton’s historical mysteries and Susan Elia MacNeal’s puzzle-box plots.
However, The Burning Library feels more grounded than many dark academia offerings. Despite the conspiracy’s scope, Macmillan maintains realistic details about academic politics, manuscript conservation, and scholarly methodology. The violence, when it comes, feels shocking rather than routine, preserving its impact.
For Similar Readers
Those who appreciate this novel’s blend of elements might also enjoy:
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova for scholarly mystery across multiple timelines
- The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield for Gothic academic atmosphere and literary puzzles
- The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason for Renaissance manuscript mysteries
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl for dark academia with female protagonists
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia for atmospheric historical horror with feminist themes
Final Assessment
The Burning Library represents an ambitious, imperfect thriller that succeeds more often than it stumbles. Macmillan tackles substantial themes while maintaining page-turning momentum, creates a genuinely intriguing historical mystery, and refuses easy moral conclusions. The novel’s flaws—occasional pacing issues, sometimes unwieldy conspiracy logistics, a somewhat rushed conclusion—don’t ultimately undermine its considerable achievements.
This won’t satisfy every reader. Those seeking straightforward suspense may find the historical detail excessive. Academic thriller purists might wish for tighter plotting and fewer characters. But readers willing to engage with its complexity will discover a thought-provoking exploration of power, knowledge, and the complicated legacy of women’s historical struggles for agency and recognition.
Macmillan demonstrates growth as a novelist here, tackling more ambitious material than her previous psychological suspense efforts. While The Burning Library may not achieve the instant classic status of The Secret History or match the scholarly rigor of Umberto Eco’s work, it carves its own compelling niche—a feminist thriller that trusts readers with moral complexity while delivering genuine page-turning excitement. In attempting something difficult and only partially succeeding, Macmillan has produced something more interesting than many safer, more predictable thrillers.