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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2013
On Sale: October 15, 2013
578 pages ISBN: 0547898045 EAN: 9780547898049 Kindle: B00AXS6BKM Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction
In the tradition of the great immigrant sagas, The Lion
Seeker brings us Isaac Helger, son of Lithuanian Jewish
immigrants, surviving the streets of Johannesburg in the
shadow of World War II Are you a stupid or a
clever?
Such is the refrain in Isaac Helger’s
mind as he makes his way from redheaded hooligan to
searching adolescent to striving young man on the make. His
mother’s question haunts every choice. Are you a stupid
or a clever? Will you find a way to lift your family out
of Johannesburg’s poor inner city, to buy a house in the
suburbs, to bring your aunts and cousins from
Lithuania?
Isaac’s mother is a strong woman and a
scarred woman; her maimed face taunts him with a past no one
will discuss. As World War II approaches, then falls upon
them, they hurtle toward a catastrophic reckoning. Isaac
must make decisions that, at first, only seem to be
life-or-death, then actually are.
Meanwhile, South
Africa’s history, bound up with Europe’s but inflected with
its own accents—Afrikaans, Zulu, Yiddish, English—begins to
unravel. Isaac’s vibrant, working-class, Jewish neighborhood
lies near the African slums; under cover of night, the slums
are razed, the residents forced off to townships. Isaac’s
fortune-seeking takes him to the privileged seclusion of the
Johannesburg suburbs, where he will court forbidden love. It
partners him with the unlucky, unsinkable Hugo Bleznick,
selling miracle products to suspicious farmers. And it leads
him into a feud with a grayshirt Afrikaaner who insidiously
undermines him in the auto shop, where Isaac has found the
only work that ever felt true. And then his mother’s secret,
long carefully guarded, takes them to the diamond mines,
where everything is covered in a thin, metallic dust, where
lions wait among desert rocks, and where Isaac will begin to
learn the bittersweet reality of success bought at truly any
cost.
A thrilling ride through the life of one
fumbling young hero, The Lion Seeker is a glorious
reinvention of the classic family and coming-of-age sagas.
We are caught — hearts open and wrecked — between the urgent
ambitions of a mother who knows what it takes to survive and
a son straining against the responsibilities of the old
world, even as he is endowed with the freedoms of the new.
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