Risk

by Linda Mannheim

Book by Linda Mannheim

310 pages, paper back

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Linda Mannheim is the author of three books of fiction: Risk, Above Sugar Hill, and This Way to Departures. Her short stories have appeared in magazines in the US, UK, South Africa, and Canada. Her broadcast work has appeared on BBC Witness and KCRW Berlin. She is also the cohost of Why Why Why: The Books Podcast.

Linda has been an exchange fellow at Kunstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany, a journalism intern in Nicaragua during the Contra War, and wrote her first novel while she was a visiting associate at the University of Cape Town's Centre for African Studies. She’s been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Authors’ Foundation Grant, and an Arts Council England grant.

For many years, Linda worked with NGOs and community organisations to develop and fund new projects. She recently launched Barbed Wire Fever, a project that explores what it means to be a refugee through writing and literature.

Originally from New York, Linda divides her time between London and Berlin.

Reviews

[Tiah]

This book came to me by an accident of sorts. I went to pay at the book exchange for my modest pile consisting of mostly easy reads when the owner handed me two books. 'I think these may be books you'd be interested in.'

Much of the storyline is set in 1999 - the same year I first came to RSA - and the narrator is an American woman.

[Michelle Hannon]

Set in New York, Miami, and South Africa in 1999, "Risk" follows the complicated relationship between Hannah and Gem. Hannah was raised in an abusive home in the tough Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. Gem was raised in a small, remote Afrikaans farming town on the veld in South Africa and was detained during the country’s state of emergency. “Risk” is about how where we’re from and our life experiences and traumas shape us and affect our relationships. This is part romance, part thriller, part cultural and political exposé, and all incredibly captivating and imaginatively told. I definitely recommend it.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Risk when it first came out and am re-reading it now, another half-decade into the experiment that is South Africa. All the conflicting passions of the land and the people who claim it are captured on the page, as seen through the eyes of an American woman whose own quest for identity is almost as intense as the events that shape her and her South African lover/kindred spirit's lives. A valuable insight into a country that is still in the news (Oscar Pistorius, Searching for Sugarman) and still healing fitfully from the sins of its past.

[Piet Opperman · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very unlikely story about a gay anti-apartheid activist who falls in love with a woman he meets at a book club in New York. Together they explore/reminisce about the days of the "struggle" and explore his undying and somewhat unrequited love for one of the freedom fighters.

I can't spoil it for you because I can't remember how it ends.

[Debbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great writer. Read as if I were there.I worried over the characters and still pray for the fight for freedom as well as equal rights home and away.

[Ron Irwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous, searing romance that explores the wages of war. A gifted writer.