The Camel Bookmobile Masha Hamilton Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 312pp, £12.99
Masha Hamilton’s third novel was inspired by the Camel Mobile Library in Kenya, which travelled from village to village, trying to improve literacy levels by lending out such dubiously useful titles as How to Survive an Avalanche.
Fiona Sweeney, a well-intentioned librarian, leaves the US hoping to make a difference in people’s lives by distributing books among the nomadic tribes of the African bush. Her work takes her to the settlement of Madidima, where she encounters Kanika, a young girl hungry for stories of other worlds, and the artistic but introverted Taban, who was mauled by a hyena as a child and is known to the villagers as Scar Boy. When two books from the library go missing, it is enough to reveal a gulf between those who welcome change and those who cling to tribal customs and the handing down of stories from person to person in the oral tradition.
Though Hamilton vividly sketches the landscape of Africa, her writing can be repetitive at times. The novel’s greatest strength is in the way it puts forward a balanced argument about the significance of the written word, capturing its power to delight and liberate at the same time as acknowledging its limitations in a world where shelter and food are not certainties.
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