The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe - Tapa blanda

This is a moving personal account of Zimbabwe under Mugabe's terror. In mid-2008, after thirty years of increasingly tyrannical rule, Robert Mugabe, the eighty-four-year-old ruler of Zimbabwe, met his politburo. He had just lost an election. But instead of conceding power, he was persuaded to launch a brutal campaign of terror to cower his citizens. Journalist and author Peter Godwin was one of the few observers to slip into the country and bear witness to the terrifying period that Zimbabweans call, simply, the Fear. Following on from his compelling and moving memoirs, "Mukiwa" and "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun", this is a personal journey through the country Peter Godwin grew up in and knows so well - a landscape and a people, grotesquely altered, laid waste by a raging despot. At considerable risk, he travels widely to see the torture bases, the burned villages, the death squads, the opposition leaders in hiding, the last white farmers, the churchmen and the diplomats putting their own lives on the line to stop the carnage. Told with Godwin's brilliant eye for character and natural storytelling gifts, this dark story of Africa's corruption and violence is populated by extraordinary characters whose lives have been shaped by the Fear.

Peter Godwin is an award-winning author and journalist. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, after military service he studied law at Cambridge University and international relations and African history at Oxford. He was a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times and a founding presenter and writer of Assignment/Correspondent, BBC television's premier foreign affairs programme. Mukiwa was an international bestseller and winner of the George Orwell Prize for political writing and the Esquire-Apple-Waterstone's Non-Fiction Award. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, about his return to Zimbabwe as it began to collapse into chaos, and The Fear: The Last Days Of Robert Mugabe are also published by Picador. He lives in New York.