Mercy - Tapa blanda

Publishers Weekly Santoro, who has covered the African AIDS epidemic, evokes the continent's everyday horrors and uncommon moments of grace in decidedly unsentimental prose, and her depiction of international journalists' lifestyles is similarly powerful. ...[T]he characters and their complicated relationships remain stirring until the end. Booklist, Leah Strauss "Santoro's experience as a journalist is evident in her straightforward prose...this debut is a notable tale of contemporary forms of suffering and relationships." O Magazine Africa--anguished, impoverished, monstrously beautiful--takes the measure of every novelist daring enough to confront its mysteries. Lara Santoro's "Mercy" (Other Press) swirls around a self-immolating Italian-born journalist named Anna, the two wildly attractive men she attracts and deflects, and her self-appointed housekeeper, aforce of nature named Mercy. The urgent message of this gorgeously written novel, which deals head-on with the ravages of AIDS on a continent of grief: Open your eyes and look hard. Critical Mass (NBCC Blog) What to Read this Fall: "Mercy" by Lara SantoroSantoro has been covering the AIDS pandemic, wars, genocide, famines... Now she's out with a novel about a hard drinking journalist working in Africa. It has some of the obvious Graham Greene echoes, but that's never been a bad thing. Tampa Tribune Online [Santoro] pens a tightly written first novel with complex characters and a gripping storyline. While a work of fiction, Santoro's authority comes from personal experience in Africa and her first-hand knowledge of international journalism. Cleveland Plain Dealer There's a great tradition of memorable servants in the world's literature, from Jeeves in P.G. Wodehouse's novels to Toundi in "Houseboy" by Ferdinand Oyono. One is tempted to add Lara Santoro's Mercy to that list....Santoro's portrayal of her t

This is a compelling debut novel about an unlikely friendship between two women - a troubled war-reporter and her formidable black companion, who is both chambermaid and counsellor.This book is suitable for lovers of African adventure, readers of "The White Masai", "The Zanzibar Chest", "I Dreamed of Africa", "Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight", "Mukiwa", "Emma's War", and Francesca Marciano.When Italian-American journalist Anna arrives in Nairobi she knows that the daily atrocities she reports on will be upsetting, but she hadn't counted on having to battle her own personal demons too. To escape the violence that surrounds her, Anna finds herself drinking too much and getting ever more entangled with two men: Michael, a fellow war-correspondent and risk-taker, and Nick, a wealthy coffee farmer - each of them hard to resist, each of them hard to love. And then Mercy enters her life - ostensibly as her maid, but almost immediately becoming Anna's most adamant judge and her harshest critic, and gradually, painfully, also her confidante and her friend. In "Anna and Mercy", Lara Santoro has created two forcefully memorable women whose dance of comprehension makes for a passionately powerful debut novel.