THE CAMEL BOOKMOBILE by Masha Hamilton

Publisher Harper Collins, April 2007

In THE CAMEL BOOKMOBILE, Masha Hamilton tells the story of a restless American librarian searching for more meaning in her life who travels to Africa to help start a library carrying books to remote settlements on the backs of camels. The bookmobile divides the semi-nomadic people it intends to serve: Scar Boy, the village teacher Matani, and others embrace it, seeing it as a much-needed taste of the outside world, while Matani's wife, her father and others fiercely oppose it, viewing it -- and the librarian herself -- as a dangerous and corrupting force. The settlement disintegrates under these pressures, while the librarian learns that cultural chasms can confound the best of intentions and doom an unexpected love.

When Masha Hamilton’s first novel, STAIRCASE OF A THOUSAND STEPS, was published in 2000, Booklist called the book “delightfully compelling,” while Publishers Weekly wrote that "Hamilton is a natural storyteller." It was a Booksense choice and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her second novel, THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US, also received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which called it “an affecting, viscerally charged work that offers no easy answers,” and was selected by Library Journal as one of the best books of 2004. Hamilton lives in New York where she teaches novel-writing and is a shiatsu practitioner.

"I've always known that books can change lives. Masha Hamilton has opened my eyes to how books can also change entire communities, and not always in the ways one might expect. The Bookmobile is a brave and astonishing novel; it transported me to a world I hadn't known, and my life is all the richer for it."
-- Gayle Brandeis, author of Self Storage and The Book of Dead Birds

"In this vivid, absorbing novel, Masha Hamilton transports her readers, even more surely than the camels do books, to the village of Mididima and the struggle between traditional values and western education. Richly peopled, full of conflicts and surprises, The Camel Bookmobile made me think and feel in all the best ways. My only regret was that the book had to end."
-- Margot Livesey, author of Banishing Verona, Homework and others

“Masha Hamilton’s magical new novel transported me across the globe, teaching me about faith, ambition, and the surprise of love. Fi is a character to fall for and cheer for. Her interactions with the people of Mididima are spellbinding and broke my heart.”
-- Amanda Eyre Ward, author of Sleep Toward Heaven and How to be Lost

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