The Laughing Monsters - Hardcover

Johnson, Denis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1443437999 ISBN 13: 9781443437998

Verlag: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014

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Présentation de l'éditeur

Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair allows himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.

Adriko is an African who styles himself a soldier of fortune and who claims to have served, at various times, the Ghanaian Army, the Kuwaiti Emiri Guard, and the American Green Berets. He's probably broke now, but he remains, at thirty-six, as stirred by his own doubtful schemes as he was a decade ago.

Although Nair believes some kind of money-making plan lies at the back of it all, Michael's stated reason for inviting his friend to Freetown is that Nair should meet Michael's fiancee, a college girl named Davidia from Colorado. Together the three set out to visit Michael's clan in the Uganda-Congo borderland-but each of these travellers is keeping secrets from the others.

Shadowed by Interpol, the Mossad, and MI-6, Nair gets mired in lust and betrayal in a landscape of frighteningly casual violence as he travels with Adriko and Davidia, gets smuggled into a war zone, kidnapped by the Congo Army, and terrorized by a self-proclaimed god ruling over a dying village. Their journey through a land abandoned by the future leads Adriko, Nair and Davidia to meet themselves not in a new light, but rather in a new darkness.

A high-suspense tale of kaleidoscoping loyalties in the post-9/11 world, The Laughing Monsters shows one of our great novelists at the top of his game.

Revue de presse

"This high-suspense tale offer a more convincing portrait of amoral intelligence agents and the havoc they wreak than almost any journalistic account of Third World skullduggery" (Washington Post Sunday)

"For all its chaos and complexity, The Laughing Monsters is one of Johnson’s most disciplined efforts" (Nathaniel Rich Atlantic)

"This echoes of Graham Greene’s bleak cynicism and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it’s a gripping romp through a world of corruption, government interference, big business manipulation and all sorts of other shenanigans to boot" (Doug Johnstone Big Issue)

"It has an irresistible sense of hopelessness" (Eva Dolan Metro)

"The Laughing Monsters is part espionage thriller and part screwball comedy, and it straddles those far-flung genres with more grace than you might think possible" (Edmund Gordon Sunday Times)

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: HarperCollins Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1443437999
• ISBN 13: 9781443437998
• Einband: Relié
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240