Henning Mankell

"Henning Mankell's last novel about an aging man whose quiet, solitary life on an isolated island off the coast of Sweden is turned upside down when his house catches fire. Fredrik Welin is a former surgeon who retired in disgrace decades earlier to a tiny island on which he is the only resident. He has a daughter he rarely sees and his mailman Jansson is the closest thing he has to a friend, and to an adversary. He is perfectly content to live out...

Arriving in Cape Town in the 1870s, Hans Bengler adopts a young San orphan he names Daniel and takes him back to Sweden, where Daniel must adjust to his new surroundings while dealing with nightmares of his dead parents calling him home.

In the aftermath of the 2006 massacre of nineteen people in a Swedish village, Judge Birgitta Roslin, a granddaughter of two of the victims, discovers the nineteenth-century diary of a gang leader that reveals the case's eerie connections to the abuse ofChinese slave workers.

Jesper Humlin is a poet of middling acclaim who is saddled by his underwhelming book sales, an exasperated girlfriend, a demanding mother, and a rapidly fading tan. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin's investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, begins to pitch and promote the nonexistent book despite Humlin's emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself...

Arriving in newly independent Zambia in the hopes of fulfilling a friend's missionary dream, Hans Olofson endeavors to make Africa his home while struggling with such past demons as his father's alcoholism and a friend's accident.

This collection of five stories traces the growth of Swedish Inspector Kurt Wallander into a first-rate detective, from rookie cop to young father to middle-aged divorce. In "Wallander's First Case, " the twenty-one-year-old patrolman's first homicide case involves his next-door neighbor, seemingly dead by his own hand. Wallander is a young father confronting an unexpected threat on Christmas Eve in "The Man with the Mask." In "The Man on the Beach,...

Fredrik Welin is a reclusive ex-surgeon living alone on a tiny island in the north of Sweden. His only companions are a pair of aged pets, and the only society callers to his living room are ants that are transforming his table into an enormous anthill. Every morning, the loner goes out to the frozen lake, cuts a hole in the ice, and then plunges himself into the freezing water to remind himself that he is still alive. Four women enter his life: Harriet,...

In Sweden in 1956, eleven-year-old Joel and his father, a logger who was once a sailor, live alone with their secrets, including Joel's secret society that meets at night and his father's new romantic interest.

Collects five mystery stories that detail Kurt Wallander's journey from a twenty-one-year-old rookie police officer to a first-rate detective.