The Bookmobile

About this book

The bookmobile is the last library for the scattered people of a vast empty county, the ranchers and homesteaders and one room schoolteachers who live an hour from the nearest town and further from the nearest library, and for eight years Della Hartley, thirty seven, has driven it, four hundred miles a week across the Sandhills, the same long loop, the same readers, a whole county's reading life carried in a truck. She keeps the route book, the lending record that goes back to the bookmobile's first driver decades ago, and it is, she has come to understand, a secret history of the county, every life on the route told in what it read, the griefs and the curiosities and the long winters legible in the borrowings, a deeper census than any the county ever took.