Black Water
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
From the author of Apple Tree Yard, a masterful thriller about espionage, love, and redemption
John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he’s already done.
In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?
Moving between Europe during the Cold War, Civil Rights–era California, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the subsequent military dictatorship, Black Water explores some of the darkest events of recent history through the story of one troubled man.
In this gripping follow-up to Apple Tree Yard, Louise Doughty writes with the intelligence, vivid characterization, and moral ambiguity that make her fiction resonate in the reader's mind long after the final page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
John Harper, the 54-year-old hero of this grim novel from British author Doughty (Apple Tree Yard), remembers being a young man in Jakarta in 1965, providing information and covert work for corporations and various governments. Still haunted by the brutal actions he committed for a Dutch private-intelligence operation, Harper has returned to Jakarta in 1998, convinced that he will be slaughtered as were so many others decades earlier. He cautiously enters an affair with a local woman named Rita, worried that she could be killed because of their association. The ambitious plot moves awkwardly from the Cold War in Europe to the Civil Rights struggle in California and back to Indonesia. Yet the different elements never fully connect, the dense prose reading more like a newspaper investigation than fiction. Although tormented by his immoral choices, Harper elicits little sympathy from the reader, except during flashbacks to his childhood in L.A.
