How would you like your Africa? Sweet and smiling or bold and bloody? A reassurance of a fundamental human goodness or a suspicion that we are all rotten to the core? Whichever you want, you can find it in one of these two very different books.
The Swedish author Henning Mankell is best known for his immensely popular Inspector Wallander series, which the BBC is currently filming with Kenneth Branagh. But as an author he is as wide-ranging as he is prolific and The Eye of the Leopard moves away from the detective genre to focus on the vexed post-colonial relationship between black and white.
The story revolves around a young Swede, Hans Olofson, who flies to Zambia in the 1970s in search of himself and to fulfil the quest of a dead friend. For lack of anything better to do, Olofson finds himself taking over the running of an up-country egg farm.
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