Deon Meyers just keeps getting better and better with each thriller. Setting his novels in contemporary South Africa, he raises the bar for thrillers by infusing each of his novels with national political tensions—historical, racial, and economic—emphasizing the urban and rural disparities which make the country so complex and so difficult to govern. Main character Lemmer, working for Body Armor, the premier bodyguard service in the country, has been hired to guard Emma le Roux, a wealthy young woman who, after seeing a news story on TV, believes that her brother Jacobus le Roux, thought dead for twenty years, is, in fact, alive—and a suspect, under an assumed name, in a mass murder in Kruger National Park. Emma herself has recently been targeted by unknown assassins and has barely escaped from her house after a violent attempt on her life. This is a terrific and unusual thriller, the fifth of Meyer’s novels, all of which are written in Afrikaans and translated.
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Basing this fine novel about the settlement of Australia’s New South Wales on the real life and notebooks made by Lt. William Dawes from 1788 – 1790, author Kate Grenville subjects the empire-building attitudes of the Crown and its representatives to careful scrutiny and creates a novel filled with conflicts and well-developed themes. New South Wales was already inhabited by an aboriginal population which had its own language and culture when a thousand British officers and prisoners, both male and female, landed their eleven ships in Sydney Cove and took over land which had been the traditional homelands of the aborigines. Lt. Daniel Rooke, the main character, a stand-in for the real William Dawes, is an astronomer who sets up an observatory on a headland and works alone, soon befriending the aborigines who are so badly mistreated by his compatriots. Firmly grounding her narrative in the human feelings and human costs of all who were involved in this sad chapter of history, she tells an important story which questions the meaning of “justice,” especially when it is applied to alien cultures which see such justice as unadulterated cruelty.
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In this remarkable impressionistic novel, author Kent Meyers focuses not on plot development and not on character analysis (however well developed the characters may be), but on the rippling effects of the death of young Hayley Jo Zimmerman on her community. Meyers does not dwell on Hayley Jo’s fate for its drama or its sadness but for its seeming inevitability, a main theme throughout the novel. Hayley Jo’s death, in turn, illuminates the choices the other residents make in their own lives and highlights the inevitability of their own fates. As Meyers explores his metaphysical themes in earthy, naturalistic detail, Twisted Tree comes alive. Dividing his novel into sixteen sections narrated by fifteen different characters, author Meyers shows their interrelationships with each other and their connections with Hayley Jo, ignoring the whole concept of time as he alternately explores past and present, shows how the diverse characters have known Hayley Jo, and builds the story of her death obliquely. (On my Favorites List for 2009)
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Set in 1988, twenty-five years after Algeria’s independence from France, the country is still suffering from political instability, corruption, and the residual rivalries and hatreds between those who supported French rule during the war and the FLN and other groups, socialist and otherwise, which fought against French rule. The internecine rivalries and hatreds among a multitude of these local groups, many of which shared the same general goals during the war, have divided families and continued into the next generation with even more bloodshed. The devastated economy at the end of the war has not been improved, people are living in poverty, religious fundamentalism is growing, the young have no future, and citizens everywhere are casting jaded eyes on those who reek of success—shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, and those who have achieved their wealth at the expense of their fellow citizens. In this newest installment of the Inspector Llob series, chronologically the “pre-quel” to the series, author Yasmina Khadra turns a spotlight on Algeria’s devastated country and its demoralized citizens.
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In 1967, an unnamed writer begins writing a long letter to an unknown recipient in Italy, a letter he knows will take weeks, if not months to conclude. The writer’s references to the Six Day War and to the fact that “here most of the people have no past and no one is surprised” quickly establish the letter writer’s home as Israel, but there are no clues about the person being addressed. Writing from Tel Aviv, the narrator reconstructs that time in his life “before Israel,” when he lived in Rome and where his parents owned the Albergo della Magnolia, an elegant hotel. The speaker, whom we learn is Dino Carpi, has been only a “twice a year Jew,” on Yom Kippur and Passover, and he ignores the then-unimportant cultural differences to pursue his love of Sonia, a Gentile. The love of Sonia and Dino is increasingly tested by political forces, and their families begin to exert ever more pressure on their relationship.
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