Selected by Marcel Berlins in The Times as one of the 50 best crime novels of the last 50 years: 'Deon Meyer is acclaimed for his portrayals of crime and the police after the end of apartheid. Non-white detectives hold positions once monopolised by their white bosses, and the tensions are high'After 602 days dry, Captain Benny Griessel of the South African police services can't take any more tragedy. So when Benny is called in to investigate a multiple homicide, it pushes him close to breaking point - a former friend and detective colleague has shot his wife and two daughters, then killed himself. Benny wants out - out of his job, his home and his relationship with his singer girlfriend, Alexa. He moves into a hotel and starts drinking. Again.But Benny's unique talent is urgently required to help investigate another crime - the high profile murder of Ernst Richter, MD of a new tech startup, Alibi, whose body is discovered buried in the sand dunes north of Cape Town. Alibi is a service that creates false appointments, documents and phone calls to enable people to cheat on their partners. It has made Richter one of the most notorious people in South Africa. Can Benny pull together the strands of his life in time to catch the killer?
CONTRIBUTORS: Deon MeyerEAN: 9781473614406COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: WEIGHT: 268 gHEIGHT: 199 cm
Crime and mystery fiction, Thriller / suspense fiction, Fiction in translation
Sharp and full of energy, his evocation of place and character second to none. The pace of the novel is breathless, yet Meyer never sacrifices authenticity or the quality of his writing. Crime, wine and a thrilling finale: a rare and unexpected treat., Deon Meyer's South Africa is laid bare in ICARUS . . . it is as glittering and hard as the diamonds his country is famous for . . . Meyer utilises the crime fiction genre as an apparatus to create a multifaceted, unsparing picture of his country, Meyer heightens the suspense . . . The richness of the characters, especially the multifaceted Benny, elevates this above most contemporary police procedurals., ICARUS places [Deon] firmly in the top international league. It's the fifth, and best, of the Benny Griessel series., South African author Deon Meyer's Benny Griessel series is one of the high points of contemporary crime fiction, and the fifth title, ICARUS, is his best yet ... expertly engineered.
Deon Meyer's books have attracted worldwide critical acclaim and a growing international fanbase. Originally written in Afrikaans, they have now been translated into twenty-eight languages.THIRTEEN HOURS was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger and won the Boeke Prize in South Africa - the first time in the prize's 16 year history that a South African book has won. His novels have also won literary prizes in France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and the film rights to seven of his novels have been optioned or sold.Deon has also written two television series, and several screenplays for movies. In 2013 he directed one of his original scripts for the feature film The Last Tango.Deon Meyer lives near Cape Town in South Africa. His big passions are motorcycling, music, reading, cooking and rugby. In January 2008 he retired from his day job as a consultant on brand strategy for BMW Motorrad, and is now a full time author. Visit the author's website at www.deonmeyer.com and follow him on Twitter @MeyerDeon
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Selected by Marcel Berlins in The Times as one of the 50 best crime novels of the last 50 years: 'Deon Meyer is acclaimed for his portrayals of crime and the police after the end of apartheid. Non-white detectives hold positions once monopolised by their white bosses, and the tensions are high'After 602 days dry, Captain Benny Griessel of the South African police services can't take any more tragedy. So when Benny is called in to investigate a multiple homicide, it pushes him close to breaking point - a former friend and detective colleague has shot his wife and two daughters, then killed himself. Benny wants out - out of his job, his home and his relationship with his singer girlfriend, Alexa. He moves into a hotel and starts drinking. Again.But Benny's unique talent is urgently required to help investigate another crime - the high profile murder of Ernst Richter, MD of a new tech startup, Alibi, whose body is discovered buried in the sand dunes north of Cape Town. Alibi is a service that creates false appointments, documents and phone calls to enable people to cheat on their partners. It has made Richter one of the most notorious people in South Africa. Can Benny pull together the strands of his life in time to catch the killer?
CONTRIBUTORS: Deon MeyerEAN: 9781473614406COUNTRY: United KingdomPAGES: WEIGHT: 268 gHEIGHT: 199 cm
Deon Meyer's books have attracted worldwide critical acclaim and a growing international fanbase. Originally written in Afrikaans, they have now been translated into twenty-eight languages.THIRTEEN HOURS was shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger and won the Boeke Prize in South Africa - the first time in the prize's 16 year history that a South African book has won. His novels have also won literary prizes in France, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, and the film rights to seven of his novels have been optioned or sold.Deon has also written two television series, and several screenplays for movies. In 2013 he directed one of his original scripts for the feature film The Last Tango.Deon Meyer lives near Cape Town in South Africa. His big passions are motorcycling, music, reading, cooking and rugby. In January 2008 he retired from his day job as a consultant on brand strategy for BMW Motorrad, and is now a full time author. Visit the author's website at www.deonmeyer.com and follow him on Twitter @MeyerDeon
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A really fantastic look at South Africa through the eyes of three groups of South Africans. An easy , page turning novel by Lance Thorburn. Strongly recommended
Female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
This novella is the female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which | also enjoyed), except that this is a memoir and that was fiction. I am sure there is both truth and fiction in both versions though.
This book covers so much philosophical ground relating to our perceptions and understanding of sanity vs insanity, what is deemed normal for women vs normal for men, how we think about the brain, and the lack of communication between those who study the brain and those who study the mind. It also raises important questions about social norms and how this affects people (especially kids) whose particular personalities or ways do not fit in with the ideas of how things should be.
In many ways we have come very far, and in other ways we still have so far to go. A novella such as this, set in the late 1960's but recounted 25 odd years later, shed some light on this even as it is being read by someone who was an adolescent in the 1990's and is reading it in 2023. Will this have less of an impact if you have never been diagnosed with a mental disorder of wondered whether you were crazy? I don't know. Are there any such people? I have never met them... In my experience, almost everyone has had some way that they did not fit in with the world around them, and the only difference was how much of themselves they had to break or give up - or if they were even able to do so - in order to appear normal, or have a lifestyle that was acceptable.
If you like pondering some of our most persistent questions about being human and the societies we create while we force labels on everything, then you may find this book quite profound. It provides no answers, but it does shed some doubt on some of the answers we thought we had. And this doubt is important if we allow for the necessity to form a more inclusive society, one that does not INTERRUPT the being of those who are different and those who don't quite fit our idea of what the world should look like. Because those people are more than we think and looking at the amount of kids that are anxious and overwhelmed and depressed these days, this shift in thinking may very well be the most important thing we need to do.
This book gets a whole 5 stars because it will stay with me for quite some time, and I think I will be rereading it often.