About the Author

Internationally bestselling novelist and playwright Henning Mankell has received the German Tolerance Prize and the U.K.'s Golden Dagger Award and has been nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize three times. His Kurt Wallander mysteries have been published in thirty-three countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe. He divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he has worked as the director of Teatro Avenida since 1985.

Reviews

“Hans Olofson's life is told [with] heart-stopping tension.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“A thriller of the mind [and] chilling journey into the depths of fear, alienation and despair. . . . A white-knuckle page-turner.”
—The Independent, London

“Mankell at his best.”
—The Telegraph, London

"A beautiful, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful coming-of-age novel."
—Booklist

As in his recent Kennedy's Brain, the author of the best-selling Kurt Wallander mysteries here turns his eye to the differences between Africa and the West, juxtaposing personal struggles with the growing pains of a newly independent state. When Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia in 1969, he is ostensibly fulfilling a dead friend's greatest wish. In fact, he is fleeing the only life he knows, his motherless childhood and alcoholic father, his failed studies and stifling social circumstances, and the loss of all those closest to him. The narrative alternates between Olofson's coming of age in Sweden and his increasingly difficult life in Zambia, where he runs an egg farm. Even after 18 years, Olofson does not fully grasp his position as a white mzungu (rich man) among the native blacks and how inappropriate his Western ideas are in a country so completely resistant to them. As the narrative continues, the paranoid fever dreams that open the novel are horrifyingly revealed to be all too plausible given the political situation. Dark and atmospheric, insightful and compelling, this book is appropriate for large fiction collections.--Karen Walton Morse, Univ. of Buffalo Libs., NY Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

"Hans Olofson's life is told [with] heart-stopping tension."
-Entertainment Weekly

"A thriller of the mind [and] chilling journey into the depths of fear, alienation and despair. . . . A white-knuckle page-turner."
-The Independent, London

"Mankell at his best."
-The Telegraph, London

"A beautiful, heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful coming-of-age novel."
-Booklist