Daniel
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander novels: The “haunting and fascinating” tale of a young boy’s harrowing odyssey from Africa to Sweden (Booklist).
In the 1870s, Hans Bengler arrives in Cape Town from Småland, Sweden, driven by a singular desire: to discover an insect no one has seen before and name it after himself. But then he impulsively adopts a young San orphan boy whose parents have been killed by European colonists. Christening the boy Daniel, Hans brings him back to Sweden—a quite different specimen than he first contemplated.
Daniel is told to call Bengler “Father,” and to knock on doors and bow. He continually struggles to understand this strange new land of mud and snow that surrounds and seemingly entraps him. At the same time, he is haunted by visions of his murdered parents calling him home to Africa. Knowing that the only way home is by sea, he decides he must learn to walk on water if he is ever to reclaim his true place in the world.
Evocative and sometimes brutal, the novel follows Daniel through a series of tragedies and betrayals that culminate in a shocking act. Henning Mankell, a world-renowned “master of atmosphere,” offers this “quiet tragedy” with a ruthless elegance all his own (The Boston Globe).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the 1870s, this earnest and heartbreaking story opens with the unsolved murder of a mentally retarded Swedish girl, but this isn't a mystery in the mode of Mankell's international bestselling Kurt Wallander novels (Firewall, etc.). Hans Bengler, a Swedish entomologist, travels across southern Africa in search of undiscovered insects. In the desert, he finds an orphaned native boy, whom he adopts on impulse and calls Daniel. Bengler brings Daniel back to Sweden to exhibit him for money. A link eventually emerges between the girl's murder and Daniel's story, which dramatically illuminates the evils of colonialism (Bengler notes that he "had to make the important decisions for these black people") and the cultural chasm between Europeans and Africans. Mankell fully understands Daniel's radically different cultural perspective and indelibly captures the boy's longing to return to his homeland and the tragic consequences of his forced exile.
