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Simon & Schuster
April 2010
On Sale: April 20, 2010
Featuring: S. Miles-Harcourt
320 pages
ISBN: 1439168539
EAN: 9781439168530
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
Now a famous classical pianist, S. Miles-Harcourt, aka
“Smiles,” arrives in Congo to play a Peace and
Reconciliation Concert, and to make amends with his former
schoolteacher and mentor, Lyman Andrew, who has buried
himself in the war-torn jungle. Smiles owes his success to
the man he helped ruin and harbors a dark secret from his
brutal public school days. But a bomb has exploded at the
hotel in Kinshasa where Smiles was due to play, and in an
unsettling turn of events he is invited to his own funeral. When coffins are broken open by the Garde Républicaine and
Smiles is not in his, he is suspected of being one of the
rebels. He escapes on a ramshackle boat with the grand piano
meant for his recital, which is now destined for his
teacher, living more than a thousand miles upriver–a world
outside time, where Smiles witnesses the miracles and the
terrors of Congo as he plays Beethoven in a forest haunted
by nameless atrocities. He is escorted by Lola, the wife of
a feared Congolese military officer–even the leopard has a
wife, says a Swahili proverb–and her adolescent brother; in
the course of their journey, Smiles and Lola fall in love,
and Lola’s brother discovers Smiles’s diary and the barbaric
past it hides. But all the while an ever vengeful leopard is
following . . . Author Paul Pickering’s arresting prose is awash in
sound–from sensuous piano strains to the crack of a rifle,
the echo of footsteps, the rumble of tribal drums, the
deafening roar of a waterfall; in Congo, each can mean the
difference between life and death, joy and sorrow. Set in
the contrasting landscapes of the African jungle and
picturesque English countryside, The Leopard’s Wife
is a searing look at the racial tensions and societal
discontents of two vastly different cultures, and it reveals
the uncivilized cruelty and tender mercies shared so
commonly by both.n n
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