Mobile Library: A Novel

  • Author: David Whitehouse
  • Narrator: Tim Gerard Reynolds
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster
  • Duration: 7:35:38
preview

Synopsis

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).

Chapters

  • MobileLibrary 01 Title

    Duration: 37s
  • MobileLibrary 02 Ch1

    Duration: 18min
  • MobileLibrary 03 Ch2

    Duration: 34min
  • MobileLibrary 04 Ch3

    Duration: 22min
  • MobileLibrary 05 Ch4

    Duration: 16min
  • MobileLibrary 06 Ch5

    Duration: 27min
  • MobileLibrary 07 Ch6

    Duration: 28min
  • MobileLibrary 08 Ch7

    Duration: 31min
  • MobileLibrary 09 Ch8

    Duration: 25min
  • MobileLibrary 10 Ch9

    Duration: 24min
  • MobileLibrary 11 Ch10

    Duration: 21min
  • MobileLibrary 12 Ch11

    Duration: 18min
  • MobileLibrary 13 Ch12

    Duration: 28min
  • MobileLibrary 14 Ch13

    Duration: 31min
  • MobileLibrary 15 Ch14

    Duration: 20min
  • MobileLibrary 16 Ch15

    Duration: 27min
  • MobileLibrary 17 Ch16

    Duration: 16min
  • MobileLibrary 18 Ch17

    Duration: 10min
  • MobileLibrary 19 Ch18

    Duration: 06min
  • MobileLibrary 20 Ch19

    Duration: 22min
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