André Brink Libros

Based on the lives of Elisabeth Larsson and Adam Mantoor

Two men, both with South African roots, but with opposing political allegiances, take a conscious decision to use violence for their political ends. An act of terror triggers a remorseless pursuit that spans magnificent landscapes and squalid townships and leads into the violent past of Africa.

In this magical novel that re-imagines stories from nine generations of South African women, ”histories, half-truths, myths, and fables weave themselves around an exile’s return to a nation on the brink of political transformation” (Boston Sunday Globe).

The novel has become a landmark in South African literature about the seventies period of unrest and death in detention. The main character is an ordinary man who tries to get at the truth behind the death of a black man. He is not motivated by political issues but by a sense of moral outrage. When he realises his life might be in danger, he entrusts all the documents of his investigation to an old friend.

Winter in South Africa - a time of searing drought, angry stirrings in Soweto, and the shadow of the Angolan conflict cast across the scorched bush. Martin Mynhardt, a wealthy Afrikaner, plans a weekend at his old family farm. But his visit coincides with a time of crisis in his personal life. In a few days, the security of a lifetime is destroyed and, with only the uncertain values of his past to guide him, Mynhardt is left to face the wreckage of his future.

Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer, an old writer, but a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year's Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled.

First edition ex-library hardcover with jacket in protective film covering. Upper leading corners and spine ends are slightly worn on jacket and hardcover. Stained and grubby page block, particularly severe on foot, but only visible on BEP and lower edge of FEP, which also has a stamp. No other signs of library markings; pages are clean and sound and text remains clear throughout. TS

When Flip Lochner, a seedy, tired journalist fleeing a failed marriage, sees a beautiful woman with four breasts in Devil's Valley, he thinks it's a mirage. But then a man called Lukas Death stands before him. So begins Lochner's search for "the truth" first hinted at by a young student in Cape Town who was mysteriously killed. Lochner meets Lukas Death's clan, where righteousness prevails by day and depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanors is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. Nothing in Devil's Valley is as it seems: the supernatural is an ingredient of every day, the living and the dead are never quite separate, the grotesque coexists with the banal. Vibrant and darkly humorous, "Devil's Valley" is splendid entertainment from a master storyteller.

"On the surface "On the Contrary is a picaresque historical novel, in which 18th century adventurer Estienne Barbier graduates from seducing French wives to South African widows via a long and bruising association with the Dutch East India Company. Underneath [it] is about today's South Africa and the dilemmas facing people challenging the status quo." - "Sunday Telegraph

As a small child in a wintry Bremen, Hanna dreams about the other side of silence, the place where the wind comes from and palm trees wave in the sun. schovat popis