Borderline

by Adam Thorpe

On a bush road in the Congo, at night in the middle of a tropical storm, baby Lucas is nearly killed in a car crash, in which his twin sisters and English mother die. His engineer father, Pierre, seriously injured, subsequently marries the Congolese nurse, Marie, and Lucas is raised in Brussels by his aunts, before returning to the newly independent Congo in 1960, aged nine. He sees it as a place of wonder – the animal, birds, and insects, the tribes with their bows and arrows. He makes friends with Mongu, the old one-handed watchman opposite, a survivor from the terrible days of King Leopold’s holocaust. All is not what it seems, we are at the height of the Cold War, when both sides are seeding the Congo with deep-cover spies. Lucas’s father and new wife are ardent left-wingers at a time when the Soviets are eager to control the strategic heart of Africa, seeking support from sympathisers of all nationalities. Eventually, when teenage Lucas eavesdrops on an emergency late-night meeting between Pierre and a CIA employee, his confusion hardens to suspicion.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published February 7, 2019

About the author

Adam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist, and playwright whose works also include short stories and radio dramas.

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris and grew up in India, Cameroon, and England. Graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1979, he founded a touring theatre company, then settled in London to teach drama and English literature.

His first collection of poetry, Mornings in the Baltic (1988), was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. His first novel, Ulverton (1992), an episodic work covering 350 years of English rural history, won great critical acclaim worldwide, including that of novelist John Fowles, who reviewed it in The Guardian, calling it "(...) the most interesting first novel I have read these last years". The novel was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for 1992.

Adam Thorpe lives in France with his wife and three children.

-Wikipedia