Best known for his crime series about the misanthropic Swedish detective Wallander, Henning Mankell explores new horizons in colonial Portuguese East Africa in the early years of the 20th century. Hanna Renström is an adventurous young woman with a talent for outliving her husbands; leaving famine-stricken Sweden, she boards a ship headed for Australia, and ends up running a brothel in Mozambique. Mankell’s inspiration came from contemporary tax records detailing a Swedish woman following that path. The narrative is fast-paced, with characters ranging from predictable (the prostitute with a heart of gold, the sleazy pimp) to surreal (a monkey in trousers). Unfortunately, subtlety of language is compromised by the translation: racial bigotry and a lack of political correctness are explicitly stated rather than sensitively explored.
