The ferociousness of the military presence in and around Daraya prevented Thomson – a seasoned war correspondent – from seeing the Secret Library for himself. Instead, he forged relationships with its instigators and patrons over scratchy Skype calls with the help of ‘an odd combination of luck, ingenuity, silver foil and a pan lid’ (the mobile phone signal was so weak in Daraya that residents created makeshift boosters by wiring frypans to their roofs).

While Thomson was never able to luxuriate in the Secret Library’s high-ceilinged quiet, he understands how fiercely it was loved and conjures the space with vivid affection, from its handmade shelves to its commodious reading chairs: ‘Books, long rows of them, line almost every wall. Grand volumes with brown leather covers; tattered old tomes with barely readable spines; pocket-sized guides to poetry; classic and contemporary novels; religious works with gaudy gold lettering; a range of reference books; all rub shoulders in well-ordered literary lines.’

The Secret Library’s book collection was necessarily haphazard but resolutely inclusive. It welcomed everything from Agatha Christie to the world-rattling feminist poets of Arab literature, like Maram al-Masri. ‘Some of the finest wordsmiths from this region have been women and their huge influence continues right up to this day,’ Thomson is delighted to learn. ‘Given the country’s patriarchal society, I incorrectly assumed that their work would have struggled to be recognised. I soon discovered how wrong I was.’ Perhaps the most touching detail Thomson reports is the library’s meticulous cataloguing system, which recorded the name of each volume’s original owner, with the hope that they would – one day – return to claim it. Hope reverberates across every page of Syria’s Secret Library, as insistent, necessary, and precarious as a heartbeat: ‘Among the books we value most are those which describe how people in other countries have dealt with traumas like ours,’ former engineering student Anas Habib explains. ‘We hope that by reading these we can learn the best ways of rebuilding our nation when the fighting has stopped.’

‘Perhaps the most remarkable factor of all was not the building itself, nor the many thousands of books within it. It was the people who created it,’ Thomson surmises. He is right. And so we meet Sara Matar, a schoolteacher who devotedly excises pictures of food from textbooks so that her near-starving students aren’t tormented by reminders of what they can’t have; Abu Malik al-Shami, ‘the Banksy of Daraya’ who paints spirited murals amid the rubble; Ayham al-Sakka, a dental student who becomes the city’s only practitioner by default, working from rescued medical textbooks; and the irrepressible Amjad, the Secret Library’s self-appointed, fourteen-year-old librarian (‘I have my own desk. It’s small, just like me’). Their stories give aching, human shape to the amorphous, geopolitical maelstrom that ‘Syria’ conjures, with its ‘mind-boggling numbers’ of dead and displaced.

Amjad lovingly cleaning books in the Secret Library (photograph from Syria's Secret Library)

‘All were to become my much treasured, long distance friends,’ Thomson writes. But it is the passionate, eloquent student co-founders of the Secret Library that are dearest to him. Abdul Basit, the ‘dreamy eyed, gregarious, generous soul’, whose devotion to Hamlet is absolute; and Anas Habib, the steadfast idealist, whose eyes are set firmly on the future: ‘When people think of building a town, they normally think only of homes, shops and offices, but we want to build a nation,’ he tells Thomson. ‘If we fail to rebuild people’s minds it will make no difference what buildings we put up.’ Battling a sadistic regime, and Western indifference, what will happen to their effulgent democratic dreams?

Libraries have graced Syrian soil for 4,500 years. The oldest library in history – the palace library of the Kingdom of Elba, a collection of cuneiform clay tablets – was unearthed in the country’s north. When the library burned in 2250 BCE, the heat of the blaze acted as a kiln and fired the words in. There is a mighty metaphor lurking here. At the height of the siege, twenty to thirty people made the furtive journey to visit Daraya’s Secret Library every day, dodging bomb blasts, skirmishes, and snipers. Its mission was ‘indivisible from the revolution itself’, Thomson writes; an anti-censorship, pro-education rebuke to the cultural vandalism, merciless opacity, and propaganda of the Assad regime.

As his relationships deepen, Thomson slips from journalist to friend. While he captures the fractal dynamics of Syrian politics, blinkered by his affection, Thomson misses the chance to interrogate what that ‘revolution’ might entail – its intentions, cohesion, and tactics. What he examines instead is how it feels to encounter the hard edge of empathy: ‘At times it often felt as if I was really there with them, inside the besieged city, exposed to the same awful dangers, hardships and horrors,’ he writes. ‘Yet, of course, I was not.’

Thomson is plagued by the question of whether the story he is telling has become a form of journalistic voyeurism. The besieged people at the heart of Syria’s Secret Library deserve to be heard on their own terms; hearteningly – vitally – Thomson never forgets it. He is a compassionate and intelligent weaver of testimony, humbly unobtrusive – honouring their brokenness, as well as their resilience. But a version of the question that haunts the author, echoes as a reader: a nagging discomfort with the fact that we seem to need extraordinary stories to remind us of the ordinary truths of human dignity.

It is easy to celebrate this poignant tale of book-loving defiance, but also to romanticise it. Syria’s Secret Library and the growing genre it joins (such as Joshua Hammer’s The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu) should demand more from us than warmed hearts and inchoate inspiration. But perhaps that is placing the blame in the wrong place. ‘We are convinced that knowledge rarely comes when you sit doing nothing,’ Anas Habib declares. ‘It usually follows hard work and sometimes taking great risks.’ As libraries around the country wither and close, literary opportunities shrink, and arts funding is razed: What hard work are we willing to do? What risks are we willing to take?