Black Water
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3.4 • 5 Ratings
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
**A BIRD IN WINTER - THE GRIPPING NEW NOVEL FROM LOUISE DOUGHTY - AVAILABLE TO PRE-ORDER NOW**
FROM THE WRITER OF BBC SMASH HIT DRAMA CROSSFIRE
John Harper lies awake at night in an isolated hut on an Indonesian island, listening to the rain on the roof and believing his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of something he's already done.
In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own troubled history. They begin an affair - but can he allow himself to get involved when he knows this might put her at risk?
Moving between Europe during the cold war, California and the Civil Rights struggle, and Indonesia during the massacres of 1965 and the decades of military dictatorship that follow, Black Water is an epic novel that explores some of the darkest events of recent world history through the story of one troubled man.
Black Water confirms Louise Doughty's position as one of our most important contemporary novelists. She writes with fierce intelligence and a fine-tuned sense of moral ambiguity that makes her fiction resonate in the reader's mind long after the final page has been turned.
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.
