Showing results by author "Sam Garrett - translator" in All Categories

It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a 15-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families.

Mr. M is being watched. As a famous writer, he is no stranger to the limelight, although interest in his work has been dwindling of late. His print runs are smaller than they used to be, as are the crowds at his bookshop signings.... Our narrator clearly takes a keen interest in M.'s work, and indeed in every aspect of his life. But what exactly are his intentions? And to what does Mr. M owe the honour of his undivided attention?

In one story we follow a group of starving, near-feral Eurasian refugees on a harrowing quest for survival; in the other we follow Pontus Beg, a policeman from a small border town on the steppe, as he investigates the death of a rabbi, one of the town's two remaining Jews. What follows is a gripping saga in which the two stories race toward each other, and Beg will be shaken to his core by what each one reveals about man's dark nature and the possibility - or impossibility - of his own redemption.