The Exchange-rate Between Love and Money
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would, ideally, like.
Meanwhile the city is overrun by black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonists all high on Dayton money. By the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk - but very little of the money - that they'd bargained for...
Winner of the Betty Trask Award.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A cast of aimless thirtysomethings vying for love and cash inhabit Leveritt's Bosnian war romance. Best friends Bannerman and Frito decamp to Sarajevo in 2003 to make their fortunes in a city flooded with redevelopment funds. No sooner are they settled than Bannerman falls in love with Frito's girlfriend, Clare, a Swiss war crimes investigator. Frito, who's a little bit crazy, becomes obsessed with the local beer and later draws Bannerman into a pharmacy scheme with a black marketer. Clare eventually warms to Bannerman, and her preoccupation with finding war criminal Petar Rankovic draws Bannerman into her professional life-and into cahoots with a crew of Anglo-American "security consultants." The novel's multiple plotlines and chronologies, choppy text and Balkan sensibilities create a unique reading experience, though the characters' moral and emotional poverty beg for a more nuanced treatment. So many characters "hanging onto decades-long adolescences" are wearying, and the intrigue angles are more confusing than they should be (there's a glossary). It's a noble effort, but this brew of lad lit and Le Carr is very much an acquired taste.