Braine, John. The Jealous God (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964) 286 p.

Vincent Dungarvan enjoys being in the Charbury (northern England) Public Library. “The Reference Department, a large circular room with radiating bookshelves, had always been one of the places in which he could find what was, when he came to think of it, literally a kind of sanctuary. It was a place where no one could make any demands on him, it was a place where, more often than not, he would simply sit still, a pen in his hand, not thinking, not even sometimes aware of himself as a person. There was nothing to distract the eye and nothing to offend it: only the books and the huge mahogany tables and the catalogue cabinets and the service counter. You emptied your mind of the irrelevant, you sat there quietly and then sometimes, there was a glimpse of the relevant.” (p. 66). He falls in love with a warm, intelligent, attractive librarian named Laura Heycliff.