The Indispensable

This story takes place in ancient roman times, so a few of the words may look strange. If you don’t know them, ’Aristo’s scroll’ at the back of the book will tell you what they mean and how to pronounce them.

He always travelled to work under an assumed name, though typically it was one he never changed. In later years, when he retired and it became public knowledge, there came a time when schoolchildren would  dance around concrete playgrounds singing of his fabled false identity and the case which made him, as one newspaper tactlessly put it, ‘hang up his hat’.

Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By helping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway, and Dr. Seuss to far-flung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger, and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.

But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile’s presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of modernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.