The Boston Public Library is the star of Kate Quinn’s latest NYT bestseller
The BU alum and former Winthrop resident’s love for Boston sparked “The Astral Library.”
By Lauren Daley, March 27, 2026, 7 minutes to read
When New York Times bestselling novelist Kate Quinn was a student at Boston University, she had three big loves: The Red Sox, the Boston Public Library and, Vinny Testa’s.
“Vinny Testa’s was great for college students because they served huge amounts of good food, and it was very reasonable. So if you were broke, it was a great spot,” the bestselling novelist, 44, says with a laugh in a recent phone interview.
Heaps of good stuff at a low (or no) price is one reason Quinn loved the Boston Public Library.
“My BPL library card was very important to me because I was a student— I was broke. I didn’t have the funds to buy books. So going to the BPL every week for a stack of books was essential,” says the California native, who studied to be an opera singer at Boston University.
While earning her Bachelors in Voice Performance from BU (‘04) and then her Master’s in Voice Performance and Historical Performance (‘06), “I was also writing on the side, querying literary agents. I’d take my laptop to the BPL to write novels,” she says.
In fact, the Sox fan wrote her first novel as a BU freshman. More on that later.
“The BPL is such a beautiful place, that as soon as I started thinking about what a dream library would look like, I thought: ‘It would look like the reading room at the BPL.’”
The former Boston resident’s bread-and-butter – what’s made Quinn a Name in the book world– are her bestselling WWI and WWII-set novels. I devoured “The Rose Code” and “The Alice Network,” the latter a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.
Quinn’s latest novel, “The Astral Library,” debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestsellers list. It’s part love letter to books, part love letter to Boston, and the BPL is its star, serving as a magical portal (a la the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series) to the titular Astral Library.
So I was intrigued by two things here. One: Quinn’s sharp pivot from historical fiction to a fantasy/magical realism novel.
Two: her authentic love for the Boston Public Library. It shines on every page. It could make even the most half-hearted reader want to run there now to cozy up with a book.
The nutshell: Alix is 26 years old, has $36.82 in her bank account, and lives with two roommates (one works at Union Oyster House) in a two-bedroom in Southie. Then she gets the boot. And loses her job.
With no family and only one friend — Beau, who owns a high-end shop on Newbury Street— she’s desperate for a life-escape.
Then, one wet evening in April, she walks into the Boston Public Library and her life changes. A door in the BPL is a portal to the fantastical Astral Library.
With a wise Yoda-like “Librarian” as a guide, it can take readers in need — most running from something — and spit them out into pages of any public domain book they chose. They then live as side characters in that world. (One Astral visitor, for example, lives in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” marries Colonel Fitzwilliam, and has a baby.)
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