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The Silence of the Tiger
by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
At the start of this dazzlingly inventive novel from Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Abbas, a world-famous photographer and estranged father to a young novelist - also named Jonas Hassen Khemiri - is standing on a luxurious rooftop terrace in New York City. He is surrounded by rock stars, intellectuals, and political luminaries gathered to toast his fiftieth birthday. And yet how did Abbas, a dirt-poor Tunisian orphan and Swedish émigré, come to enjoy such success?
Jonas is fresh off the publication of his first novel when answers to this question come in the form of an unexpected e-mail from Kadir, a lifelong friend of Abbas and an effervescent storyteller with delightfully anarchic linguistic idiosyncrasies. The portrait Kadir paints of Abbas - from a voluntarily mute boy who suffers constant night terrors, to a soulful young charmer, to a Swedish immigrant and political exile - proves to be vastly different from Jonas's view of his father. As the two jagged versions reconcile in Kadir and Jonas's impassioned correspondence, we're given a portrayal of a man that is at once tender and feverishly imagined.
With an arresting blend of humor and wit, Montecore marks the stateside arrival of an already acclaimed international novelist. Winner of the PO Enquist Literary Prize for accomplished European novelists under forty, Jonas Hassen Khemiri has created a world that is as heartbreaking as it is exhilarating.
"Though the overly elaborate structure can grow tiresome, Willson-Broyles's masterful translation and the energy and freshness of Khemiri's voice make this imaginative book a worthwhile read." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. While the novel is at times genuinely amusing, it also explores serious themes of cultural homogeneity...Khemiri adds a distinctive and quirky voice—actually several of them—to contemporary literature." - Kirkus Reviews
"Award-winning Swedish author Khemiri's novel contains such complex layers that at first it is confusing and off-putting. But patient readers will be rewarded." - Library Journal
"Montecore will startle many American readers who know little of the anti-immigrant sentiments that have been fomenting in Sweden since the 1990s. An illuminating and involving novel." - Booklist
"Montecore is brilliant. Like its title - an invented creolized noun equal parts Arabic, French, Swedish, Siegfried & Roy, and Dungeons & Dragons - Jonas Hassen Khemiri's novel is itself a thrillingly hybrid creature: an immigrant story, a coming-of-age tale, an epistolary epic, an indictment of Swedish racism and nationalism, a meditation on storytelling and translation...Above all, however, this is a beautiful novel, a bewitching novel, as funny as it is heartbreaking, as self-aware as it is self-effacing, and certainly the best book that I've read in a long time." - Rattawut Lapcharoensap, author of Sightseeing
This information about Montecore was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in 1978, has a Tunisian father and a Swedish mother. He grew up in Stockholm, studied literature in Paris, and was an intern at the United Nations. In 2003, his novel One Eye Red was published to enormous acclaim and received the Borås Tidning Award in 2004 for best literary debut, Sweden’s most illustrious award for a first book. Montecore was awarded Sweden’s highest honor for a young novelist, the PO Enquist Literary Prize, in 2006. Khemiri lives in Stockholm.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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They say that in the end truth will triumph, but it's a lie.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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