Red Dog (13 page)
Authors: Louis De Bernieres
Louis de Bernières
Louis de Bernières has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book Eurasia Region in 1991 and 1992, and for Best Book in 1995. He was selected by
Granta
as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993, and lives in Norfolk, East Anglia.
ALSO BY
L
OUIS DE
B
ERNIÈRES
BIRDS WITHOUT WINGS
In
Birds Without Wings
, Louis de Bernières creates a world, populates it with characters as real as our best friends, and launches it into the maelstrom of twentieth-century history. The setting is a small village in southwestern Anatolia in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone there speaks Turkish, though they write it in Greek letters. It’s a place that has room for a professional blasphemer; where a brokenhearted aga finds solace in the arms of a Circassian courtesan who isn’t Circassian at all; where a beautiful Christian girl named Philothei is engaged to a Muslim boy named Ibrahim. But all of this will change when Turkey enters the modern world. Epic in sweep, intoxicating in its sensual detail,
Birds Without Wings
is an enchantment.
Fiction/Literature
CORELLI’S MANDOLIN
Extravagant and inventive,
Corelli’s Mandolin
is the story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history. The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island’s shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerrilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island.
Fiction/Literature
A PARTISAN’S DAUGHTER
England, late 1970s. Forty-something Chris is trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. Roza, in her twenties, the daughter of one of Tito’s partisans, has only recently moved to London from Yugoslavia. One evening, Chris mistakes her for a prostitute and propositions her. Instead of being offended, she gets into his car. Over the next months Roza tells Chris stories of her past. She’s a fast-talking, wily Scheherazade, saving her own life as she retells it—and Chris is rapt. This deeply moving novel of their unlikely love is also a brilliantly subtle commentary on the seductive power of storytelling.
Fiction/Literature
THE WAR OF DON EMMANUEL’S NETHER PARTS
This rambunctious novel is set in an impoverished, violent, yet beautiful country in South America, where the haughty Doña Constanza decides to divert a river to fill her swimming pool. The local villagers need the river to irrigate their crops, while their spokesman, the dissolute and foul-mouthed Don Emmanuel, uses it for other, unmentionable purposes. And what ensues is a fullblown war, in which ragged peasants go up against a brutal soldiery—and in which Louis de Bernières displays all his signature gifts: high adventure, unrestrained comedy, a feel for climatic and sexual humidity, and prose of rare vibrance and color.
Fiction/Literature
SEÑOR VIVO AND THE COCA LORD
When Dionisio Vivo, a young lecturer in philosophy, bombards the newspapers with denunciations of the cocaine mafia, he becomes a hero and a target. He grows accustomed to the corpses that turn up on his doorstep, and attempts on his life backfire so wildly that Señor Vivo acquires a reputation for supernatural invulnerability—as well as a following of young women who are fiercely determined to bear his child. But Dionisio’s protection does not extend to those he loves. And what began as a farce turns into a novel of tragic love and macabre revenge.
Fiction/Literature
THE TROUBLESOME OFFSPRING OF CARDINAL GUZMAN
Louis de Bernières continues his chronicle of Cochadebajo, the Andean village where macho philosophers, defrocked priests, and reformed prostitutes cohabit in cheerful anarchy. But this unruly utopia is imperiled when Cardinal Guzman decides to inaugurate a new Inquisition. On his side, the Cardinal has an army of fanatics who are all too willing to destroy bodies in order to save souls. The Cochadebajeros have precious little ammunition, unless you count chef Dolores’s incendiary Chicken of a True Man and a civil defense that deems nothing more crucial than the act of love.
Fiction/Literature
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