Daniel

Daniel / Henning Mankell


Hans Bengler, a Swede with a dwindling fortune and uncertain career prospects, travels to southern Africa in the 1870s to collect insects, particularly something rare that he can name for himself and thereby become famous. Instead, he discovers a young African boy of the San people, orphaned when his family is killed in a raid by white explorers. Bengler names the boy Daniel and takes him back to Sweden, where they begin a wandering life, with Daniel on display to curious Europeans. Their wandering ends in disaster and the abandonment of the boy to a farm family in the hinterlands of Sweden. Daniel pines for the desert and is visited by his parents' spirits as he searches for a chance to walk on the ocean in a return trip to the desert. Mankell, highly acclaimed for the Kurt Wallander mysteries, offers a haunting and fascinating story of clashes of culture and race in the nineteenth century as well as a touching, sometimes cruel examination of familial and other human ties.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist
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