The Laughing Beast
by O
About This Novel
Known as "the writer's writer's writer"; winner of the U. S. National Book Award and the Library of Congress American Literature Lifetime Achievement Award; the last novel before his death by the author of "The Son of Jesus", "Train Dreams" and "The Gift of the Sea Nymph"; Dennis Johnson's still poetic but suspenseful spy novel. Lorraine Nair claims to be Nordic, but holds an American passport. After ten years away, he returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone, Africa, and was reunited with his old friend Michael Adrick at the summons. The two had made a fortune during the country's civil war, and now Nair has returned to this "place of despair" with the hope of "second luck." Adrik, a Ugandan, is a combat mercenary trained by the United States. At thirty-six years old, he is still as enthusiastic about his uncertain plans as he was ten years ago. "The end of the plan is amazingly wonderful," he told Nair. Together with Adric's fiancée, a graduate student from Colorado named Davidia, the two embarked on a journey into the Congo mountains that 19th-century missionaries called "the laughing beast." Along the way, they experienced thousands of dangers together, but everyone concealed something from each other. This is a spy novel full of suspense and changing loyalties, mainly set in Sierra Leone, Congo and Uganda, in the period after the Rwanda genocide in the 1990s. The author Dennis Johnson personally witnessed and reported on these conflicts as a journalist.
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