Kirjahaku

Now in paperback from London Times columnist Paul Pickering--the breathtaking story of a young pianist who travels through the Congo to meet a former mentor with whom he shares a dark past, falling in love with a Congolese army officer's wife along the way. - A renowned writer: A seasoned journalist and novelist, Paul Pickering has traversed the globe for his stories. For The Leopard's Wife, he undertook an expedition down the Congo River, from Kisangani to Kinshasa, to craft a novel brimming with authenticity of a majestically beautiful country torn apart by civil war. - A captivating story of love and war: The Democratic Republic of Congo has been embroiled in a civil war since 1998, during which more than 5 million people have been killed. The Leopard's Wife provides a searing look at both the atrocities committed, particularly against women, and the resiliency of its people to soldier on in the face of constant uncertainty. It is a beguiling story of greed, power, and ever-changing alliances, of the consequences of misplaced idealism and betrayal, and of the lengths people will go to for love.

In a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus. But a hundred years later an American academic feels the boy may have invented the elephant as the only kind and uplifting being in dark times.

Paul Pickering’s new anti-war novel Lucy is about obedience and rebellion, how one survivor in the actual and moral wasteland of immediate post-war Berlin takes over the lives of three others, psychologically and sexually, in the way Hitler took over a country. The worldwide protests surrounding the 2024 conflict in Gaza mirror the rebel spirit at the heart of Pickering’s important, groundbreaking novel. Set partly in a German kibbutz, started by Nazis to remove Jews, there is a clash between utopian ideas and the toxic nationalism necessary to found the state of Israel. Operation Lucy, once an idealistic, anti-Nazi espionage ring, of which all the main characters are part, has become a self-devouring monster. Lucy is darkly comic, showing how best intentions, when they pass through the looking-glass of human failings, change to the opposite. Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” means no escape because of contradictory rules, “Lucy” is the Lucifer paradox, where the only good is bad, and only bad is good. A thrilling, disturbing and utterly compelling read from one of the UK’s most celebrated authors.