This is something a bit different from Henning Mankell. I know him mainly… well exclusively really… for his Kurt Wallander novels. Or perhaps those of Wallander’s daughter, who’s lately become a police officer herself in the series.
But Mankell has spent and still spends a lot of time in Africa. And that’s where this novel is set. It’s not too clear where precisely we are, but the location is somewhere sub-Saharan and is told in flashback by a small “child”. I only use those quotation marks because for a child as young as he is, the language he uses is remarkably mature.
Nelio is the street child who’s life we hear about, and it involves slavery, death, hardship, and some episodes which remind me more of something like The Life of Pi or even Arabian Nights.
Nonetheless, it was a good, sad, book. And I daresay that I’m not the only Swedish crime reader who’s been sneaked off to Africa as a result.