From the award-winning novelist David Whitehouse, hailed by The New
York Times as "a writer to watch," a tragicomic adventure about a
troubled adolescent boy who escapes his small town in a stolen
library-on-wheels.
"An archivist of his mother," Bobby Nusku spends his nights meticulously
cataloging her hair, clothing, and other traces of the life she left
behind. By day, Bobby and his best friend Sunny hatch a plan to
transform Sunny, limb-by-limb, into a cyborg who could keep Bobby safe
from schoolyard torment and from Bobby's abusive father and his
bleach-blonde girlfriend. When Sunny is injured in a freak accident,
Bobby is forced to face the world alone.
Out in the neighborhood, Bobby encounters Rosa, a peculiar girl whose
disability invites the scorn of bullies. When Bobby takes Rosa home, he
meets her mother, Val, a lonely divorcee, whose job is cleaning a mobile
library. Bobby and Val come to fill the emotional void in each other's
lives, but their bond also draws unwanted attention. After Val loses her
job and Bobby is beaten by his father, they abscond in the sixteen-wheel
bookmobile. On the road they are joined by Joe, a mysterious but
kindhearted ex-soldier. This "puzzle of people" will travel across
England, a picaresque adventure that comes to rival those in the classic
books that fill their library-on-wheels.
At once tender, provocative and darkly funny, Mobile Library is a
fable about the intrinsic human desire to be loved and understood--and
about one boy's realization that the kinds of adventures found in books
can happen in real life. It is the ingenious second novel by a writer
whose prose has been hailed as "outlandishly clever" (The New York
Times) and "deceptively effortless" (The Boston Globe).
