The Shadow Girls: A Novel - Hardcover

Mankell, Henning

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595581928 ISBN 13: 9781595581921

Publisher: The New Press, 2012

Synopsis

From the New York Times–bestselling author: A story of one man’s awakening and “a heartfelt reminder of the many people whose struggles are never known” (The Plain Dealer).
 
Jesper Humlin, a poet of middling acclaim and underwhelming book sales, is facing a crisis. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin’s investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, starts pitching and promoting the nonexistent book despite Humlin’s emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself thrust into a world where names shift, stories overlap, and histories are both deeply secret and in profound need of retelling.
 
Leyla from Iran, Tanya from Russia, and Tea-Bag, who is from Africa but claims to be from Kurdistan (because Kurds might receive preferential treatment as refugees)―these are the shadow girls who become Humlin’s unlikely pupils in impromptu writing workshops. Though he had imagined their stories as fodder for his own book, soon their intertwining lives require him to play a much different role.
 
Offering both surprising humor and heartrending tragedy, The Shadow Girls is a “passionate and entertaining” triumph that will astonish longtime fans of Mankell’s acclaimed Kurt Wallander novels as well as readers new to his work (The Daily Telegraph).

About this title

About the Author

Henning Mankell (1948–2015) was an internationally bestselling author who received numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association’s Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are global bestsellers and have been adapted into the PBS Masterpiece Mystery! series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. The New Press has published English translations of nine of his Kurt Wallander mysteries—Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, One Step Behind, Firewall, The Man Who Smiled, and The Pyramid—and Before the Frost: A Linda Wallander Mystery; the novels The Return of the Dancing Master, Chronicler of the Winds, Depths, Kennedy’s Brain, The Eye of the Leopard, Italian Shoes, Daniel, and The Shadow Girls; and the nonfiction I Die, But My Memory Lives On: The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project. Born in Stockholm, Mankell grew up in the Swedish village of Sveg. He divided his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he was a director at Teatro Avenida.

Edition details

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1595581928
• ISBN 13: 9781595581921
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 330