Syria's Secret Library, by Mike Thomson, tells a small story in the larger tragedy of Syria

For them, I had offered not a present but a passport, a way up and out, a token of hope.

Imagine the joy such books would have provoked in the town of Daraya, where 90,000 Syrians once lived on the southern outskirts of Damascus.

Daraya's inhabitants are the heroes of Syria's Secret Library, a celebration of unbluffed courage and unstinting commitment to what books mean.

Or, in Mike Thomson's words, this is a story which shows "how a love of literature, learning and culture had somehow survived, amid all the cruelty and bloodshed".

Daraya was attacked, then besieged, and finally conquered by pro-Assad Syrian government forces. Despite continuing attacks, many of the town's books were rescued from burning houses and bombed offices.

Having survived the ravages of rain, sun and wind, the books were assembled into an improvised library, installed in an abandoned basement to withstand bombing, missile strikes, shelling and sniping.

Rescuing dusty, damp and dirty books enabled intrepid locals to rescue themselves, at least for an interlude, by keeping their minds sharp, doing useful things and stealing "a few precious moments quietly choosing books, reading and exchanging views".

Under such extreme pressure, other readers might have behaved differently. After the Cold War ended, I talked to an East European writer giving a speech in Paris. He realised that gig entailed using some apposite quotes from esteemed classics.

Turning to his collection of favourites, the author remembered that he had burned most of his books for warmth the previous winter.

Temptations like that must have arisen in Daraya as well, whether to build a fire with the books, use them as fodder for barricades, or keep only those who promised pure escapism.

If you lived in Daraya, where else could you invest any vestigial hope?

Cherished pre-war recreations like soccer, weddings and a treat at the ice cream café had gone for ever, as had a ready market for the town's wooden bedroom furniture.

As the civil war lurched on (for six and a half years now), any hope of safeguarding traditional customs or historic sites (Aleppo market and Palmyra especially) would have seemed as forlorn as the vain promise of benign foreign intervention.

Nothing and nobody was coming to help Daraya. Instead, Daraya placed its hopes - for jobs in some implausible future, a learned skill or just for some fugitive relief - in its library.

Syrians who could no longer control their lives could at least record names, addresses and return dates in borrowed books.

The books themselves were an eccentric, eclectic selection, not restricted to orthodox religious materials from the mosque. Addicted, committed readers will try anything.

Daraya's library attracted a loyal and devoted readership, particularly among older children looking out for those readers younger than them.

Thomson draws comparisons with libraries in Nazi ghettoes (in Theresienstadt and Vilnius) or in Myanmar under the generals (the Tharapar library). They, too, served as chapels to civilisation.

Much of Thomson's story is told at one remove. With limited Arabic, he began by communicating long distance from London to Daraya through audio diaries, Skype, What's App interviews and messages typed on mobile 'phones.

Nonetheless, Thomson is proficient at introducing and sustaining a human factor in his tale, focusing on a few users of the library, then following their travails.

His digressions (explaining a wall artist, the poet Adonis or the ingenuity of a partly-trained dentist) fit well enough in the structure, and give the tale extra life and colour.

Thomson publicised the library (which opened in 2014) on BBC radio before starting this book; another team of journalists recorded its fate, ransacked and sold off by Assad's troops.

The survivors among the library's clients also fared badly, fighting on with rebel forces elsewhere or re-settled into a camp.

For both groups, access to books must seem a distant dream.

Syria's Secret Library is a small episode in a great, continuing tragedy.

The book might have been marred by sentimentality, by repetition (a relatively thin story stretched too far), by the journalist intruding himself into the narrative, or by too many outsider judgments about Syria.

By and large, Thomson deftly skirts those pitfalls.

His most ambitious claim, that the library comprised "a part of the very soul of those fighting", does seem vindicated by testimony from the Daraya residents themselves.

Those not satisfied by this story of rescued volumes might turn to Charles English's The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, an edgier but less poignant tale.

Where Timbuktu preserved venerable texts from the past, Daraya cherished hope for the future.