Chronicler of the Winds

From the bestselling author of the Kurt Wallander Mysteries: An "uplifting . . . grittily realistic" fable about war-torn Africa and a mystical orphan boy (The New York Times).

A single gunshot cracks the silence of a hot African night. On the rooftop of a local theater company, a ten-year-old boy slowly dies of bullet wounds. He is Nelio, a leader of street kids, rumored to be a healer and a prophet, and possessed of a strangely ancient wisdom.

One of the millions of poor people "forced to eat life raw," Nelio refuses to be taken to the hospital. Instead, he tells the unforgettable story of his life to a sole witness. Over the course of nine nights, a baker named Jos Antonio Maria Vaz listens as bandits cruelly raze Nelio's village, propelling him to join the legions of abandoned children living in the streets. A grand act of imagination intended to prove to his comrades that existence must be more than mere survival, cuts Nelio's life short. As the tale unfolds, Jos is forever changed. He becomes the "Chronicler of the Winds", vowing to reveal Nelio's magical words to all who will listen.

Shortlisted for the Nordic Council Prize for Literature and nominated for the Swedish Publishers Association's August Prize, Chronicler of the Winds is a beautifully crafted novel that is a testament to the power of storytelling itself. "Mankell writes eloquently of the realities of poverty and violence without becoming sugary or didactic. . . . An expert craftsman" (The Observer).

Author: Henning Mankell
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: New Press
Published: 04/25/2006
Pages: 233
Weight: 0.89lbs
Size: 8.52h x 6.02w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781595580580

About the Author
Henning Mankell is an internationally bestselling author who has 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 ten of his Wallander mysteries--Faceless Killers, The White Lioness, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, One Step Behind, Firewall, The Dogs of Riga, Before the Frost, The Man Who Smiled, and The Pyramid--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 1948, Mankell grew up in the Swedish village of Sveg. He now divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as a director at Teatro Avenida.