Hachette Livre

Hachette Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. ‘Sometimes idealism imposes.’ Is the Camel Bookmobile entirely a good idea?
  2. ‘The assumptions people made about one another were invariably wrong, she’d found.’ To what extent is The Camel Bookmobile a novel about assumptions?
  3. ‘You Americans . . . with your unflagging belief in your abilities – and your right – to change the course of another’s history.’ Are we the same?
  4. Does Mididima have a future?
  5. Has the book changed the way you think about Africa? If so, how?
  6. What would be the best books for the Camel Bookmobile to carry?
  7. ‘There were limitations to language, even when it was shared. Sometimes words were not sturdy enough to hold all the needed meaning.’ Do you agree with Fi?
  8. The people of Mididima have a special relationship with the land – did you feel Fi ever understood that? Did you?
  9. ‘How uncivilized it was to bring an unsolicited gift from their world and then dictate how it must or must not be used.’ Which world is the most civilised?
  10. ‘He knew now, if he hadn’t known before, that there were limitations to words – words in the air or on a page.’ What sort of limitations, to language and communication, does The Camel Bookmobile examine?
  11. ‘Later, she would ask herself, and ask herself again, who had given in that arid settlement of Mididima, and who had received: who had learned and who had taught.’ And if you ask yourself ?

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