A Treacherous Paradise

June 3, 2013
Africa features prominently in the work of Mankell (The Shadow Girls), both in his acclaimed Wallander mysteries and his many stand-alone books, including this fine historical set in Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) in the early 20th century. Having no prospects, Hanna Lundmark (née Renström) is sent away to find work as a cook on a ship sailing for Australia, where she falls for an officer who dies on the voyage. Once docked in Lourenço Marques, the young widow finds her way to a hotel/brothel owned by Senhor Vaz, whose proposal of marriage Hannah accepts. When he too dies, Hannah inherits his brothel and tries to make sense of her life and the world. Like many Mankell novels, the plot seems strange, even incredible, in summary form, but his gift lies in the creation of a sequence of events that is credible and illuminating. The proverbial stranger in a strange land, Hanna is the lens that exposes the ugly realities of racism, sexism, and colonialism—easy targets, obviously, but this book is very much of a piece with Mankell’s nongenre, and more polemical, works. Hanna is a curious mix of helplessness and fortitude, and her story, like the story of Africa itself, is tragically sad. Agent: Anneli Hoier, Leonhardt & Hoier.

July 1, 2013
The chronicler of Kurt Wallander (The Troubled Man, 2011, etc.) sets his sights on something dramatically different: the African odyssey of a young turn-of-the-century Swedish woman that's based on facts--just not very many facts. Five years after her lumberjack father's death in 1899, Hanna Renstrom's mother, Elin, sends the 18-year-old off to businessman Jonathan Forsman's home in coastal Sundsvall, where the chances of survival look brighter. Forsman not only treats Hanna kindly and respectfully and gives her a job as a maid, but arranges her passage to Australia as a higher-salaried cook on a ship he partly owns. Hanna finds love aboard the Lovisa, but barely a month into her marriage to third mate Lars Lundmark, a fever carries him off. Armed with 50 in widow's benefits, and lacking any strong ties to the ship or its destination, Hanna decides on the spur of the moment to steal away while the Lovisa is docked one night in Lourenco Marques and runs smack into another world. When she finds that she's seriously ill, she begs help from women she thinks run a hotel. They're actually prostitutes in Senhor Attimilio Vaz's brothel, O Paraiso, and he's the highest-contributing taxpayer in all of Mozambique. Here, Hanna once again finds unexpected kindness and romance even before she ends up as the owner of O Paraiso, but this time, the world in which she's landed is shot through with a racism so pervasive that it defines every human relationship, and Hanna's closest and most enduring emotional connection turns out to be with Carlos the monkey. Hanna's adventures, based on elliptical hints from the journal of a real-life Swedish madam in 1905 Mozambique, make a story as magical as a fairy tale and just about as brutal too.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 1, 2013
In 1904, Hanna Lundmark, a young widow from poverty-stricken northern Sweden, arrives in Loureno Marques, a coastal town in Portuguese East Africa. Following a series of unexpected events, she becomes the owner of a prosperous brothel of black prostitutes. Her new environment proves difficult to navigate, particularly its blatant racism. Nobody knows what to make of a rich white businesswoman, either. Black-white relations, evoked with subtle skill and mordant humor, are marked by mutual incomprehension and fear, and Hanna's attempts at friendliness and generosity toward her employees are met with unnatural silences. When she obeys her conscience and makes a gutsy decision against bigotry, the plot takes turns at once surprising and not. Mankell, Scandinavian crime fiction's brightest star, structures his latest around a true story from turn-of-the-century Mozambique. Considerable suspense derives from the tense atmosphere and the fact that neither Hanna nor the reader knows quite what will happen next. The tragic effects of colonialism in this divided land emerge slowly via a succession of shocking reveals. This powerful work boasts a courageous, well-drawn heroine and makes its points without stridency or didacticism. Since it's written by Mankell, an author of such high stature, it should get the large audience it deserves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2013

Not another Kurt Wallender tale but graced with the same sense of cool urgency and an abiding social concern, this work opens in 1905 as desperately poor Hanna Renstrom abandons Sweden for Australia. After being widowed twice, she ends up as the owner of a bordello in Mozambique, isolated from other white colonialists by her profession and from the bordello's women by her skin color. Hanna is tough, though, and finds a way to survive this "treacherous paradise."

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.