Chronicler of the Winds
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
A moving, deeply affecting story about street children in Africa, from the bestselling writer behind the Kurt Wallander series
One night José hears gunfire from the deserted theatre next door to his bakery. He races to the theatre's uppermost gallery, and there beneath him on a spotlit stage lies the wounded body of Nelio, a street urchin renowned for living on his wits. Gasping, the wounded boy asks to be taken to the roof to breathe the beautiful air fresh of the Indian Ocean. On that theatre roof, his life ebbing away, Nelio begins to tell José his extraordinary story... Henning Mankell's Chronicler of the Winds is a dazzling new venture from the master of crime; a beautifully told fable of the African continent.
‘Mankell here creates a gentle, supernatural mystery...infused with dreaminess and wit’ Observer
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mankell's evocative, quietly powerful novel, first published in 1995, tells the unbearably sad story of 10-year-old Nelio, a mortally wounded street kid in an unnamed African port city. After revolutionary soldiers kill his family and most of the people in his village ("to show us they were serious in their struggle to liberate us and help us have a better life"), Nelio makes his way to the city where he joins a gang of homeless orphans, eventually and reluctantly becoming their leader. They have "only one mission in life: to survive," but that's essentially all they can hope for. Mankell, best known for his Kurt Wallander mystery series (The Dogs of Riga, etc.), vividly depicts in this heartbreaking fable the ongoing tragedy of Africa's disenfranchised. At times the narrative strays too far from Nelio's story and the tone slips into a kind of magical realism, but it's impossible not to be moved by the tale of Nelio's short and painful life.
