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A Novel
by Malla Nunn
Emmanuel Cooper's life is finally back on track when a request comes from Colonel van Niekerk that he report to the local police station in Balgowan, a small trading post in the Natal Midlands. When Cooper arrives, he learns of the disappearance of an adolescent Zulu girl in the wild foothills of the Drakensberg - and the local police are reluctant to search for her.
Sensing that something terrible has happened out on Little Flint Farm, Cooper plunges into the class driven life of transplanted English aristocrats and the traditional world of the old Zulu chiefs. He must break the silence of the opposing communities and dig through their buried secrets to find out what happened to the girl, and why… no matter the cost.
Paperback original
"Starred Review. Gripping and thoughtful... Nunn brilliantly combines character and fair play clues." - Publishers Weekly
"A disturbing book with a morally compelling hero." - Booklist
"Historical hindsight may make readers a bit more self-congratulatory about recognizing the evils of apartheid, but it won't help them see around the curves Nunn has plotted or rise above her insight into the enduring dilemmas of her separate-and-unequal world." - Kirkus Reviews
"An engrossing and compelling read... saturated with the feel of 1950s South Africa." - Mike Nicol, author of the Revenge trilogy
This information about Blessed Are the Dead 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.
Malla Nunn grew up in Swaziland before moving with her parents to Perth in the 1970s. She attended university in Western Australia, and then the US. In New York, she worked on film sets, wrote her first screenplay, and met her American husband-to-be, before returning to Australia, where she began writing and directing short films and corporate videos.
Fade to White, Sweetbreeze and Servant of the Ancestors have won numerous awards and have shown at international film festivals from Zanzibar to New York. Malla and her husband live in Sydney with their two children.
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