It’s through her investigation that Ropa discovers her best friend Jomo has begun to work at a private and prestigious Library.
But as mysterious occurrences around town begin to point to a larger child abduction operation, Ropa quickly realizes that if she doesn’t help the children, no one will. When a deceased mother begs for Ropa to find her missing son, Ropa is more than hesitant to take on a non-paying job. But, Ropa is also incredibly smart and loyal and does all she can to protect her grandmother and sister from the stress. Needless to say, Ropa has a lot of responsibility and it is really, really starting to wear on her. It’s also up to Ropa to run all errands, maintain the caravan, and protect her family.
With her grandmother’s ailing eyesight and her sister still being quite young, it’s up to Ropa to make enough money relaying messages from the dead to the families they left behind. With all that it has going on, it would be easy to stray off course, but Huchu keeps the story tight and the characters never stray from the world’s rules that have been crafted for them.Īfter losing their home, Ropa, along with her sister and grandmother move into their caravan and are barely making ends meet.
Set in a complex and strange near future, The Library of the Dead, is a genre-bending mix of fantasy, post-apocalyptic dystopia and mystery. Add in “the dead” and I’m instantly intrigued. Huchu imbues his strange world with wonderful and believable details, and Ropa’s blend of African mysticism and Scottish pragmatism is central to her appeal, a terrific central character for a properly immersive story from start to finish.I am a sucker for any book with “library” in the title. Support The Big Issue and our vendors by signing up for a subscription. Lockdowns have taken income away from hundreds of Big Issue sellers. Ropa is hired by a dead woman to find her missing son, and it leads her on a path to discover the city’s dark secrets. In this universe, magic of various kinds is an accepted reality and the line between the ordinary and fantastical worlds is blurred. Inventive and entertaining, the book is set in an alternative dystopian version of Edinburgh and follows teenage girl Ropa as she earns a living as a ghostalker, passing messages between the living and the dead. The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu is another terrific examples of a fictional world that is out there in terms of what a reader might expect, but written with such confidence as to be irresistible.
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