Travelling Library

Magical, strange, original, tender and funny, The Travelling Library is a moving story of love and family and books, for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and The Ministry of Time.

Edinburgh, 1993: Fourteen-year-old Keely Jackson loves books, his best friend Josie, his mother, his hamster and the travelling library that visits his housing estate every second Thursday. He also loves his father, despite his quick fists. Inspired by The Colditz Story and what sounds like a prophecy on mysterious reel-to-reel tapes, he's digging a tunnel; one he hopes that might take him far away, to Australia - the birthplace of his former POW grandfather, Rex - where he believes he has to save a life.

Australia, 2053: Fortysomething widower Ashley Jackson loves his child Hope, his parents and their partners, all of whom live cheek by jowl in a 'subterrane' under the abandoned city of Melbourne. The present is dark and the future is uncertain, so he's gone back to the past: writing a memoir about being a fourteen-year-old in in Melbourne in 2023, a magical year during which Ashley was sad about his parents splitting up, obsessed with his best friend Frankie and a controversial, short-lived multiplayer videogame, Sceptre of Shori, in which players fight each other to the death and journey through portals and tunnels to strange new lands.

When Keely and Ashley unexpectedly meet - father and son, both teenagers, connecting across space and time - they face a reckoning. Might they help each other overcome their perceived and very real enemies? What does it mean to be, or strive to become, a good man? How central to all of these - maybe all worthwhile questions - is love? And what stories matter most in the end?

Magical, strange, original, tender and funny, The Travelling Library is a moving story of love and family and books - and the importance of being there for each other, regardless of everything that gets in the way, in the fraught, confounding, but also bittersweet and beautiful journey from adolescence to early adulthood.