Kruger's Alp

Description

Winner of the 1985 Whitbread Prize for Fiction: Kruger's Alp moves from pulpit to black township, from Johannesburg's fortress prison to the underworld of Soho as we follow renegade priest Theodore Blanchaille in his search for the legendary gold spirited away by President Kruger in order to found an earthly paradise.'An extremely attractive book, witty and fast-moving and densely imagined' Sunday TimesTheodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret travellers' rest for fleeing pilgrims, and from the streets and cellars of Soho to paradise at last on a Swiss mountainside, Kruger's Alp is a fantastical political satire of extraordinary invention.

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger's Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, and My Mother's Lovers, published by Atlantic Books in 2006 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running (1988).

"'An extremely attractive book, witty and fast-moving and densely imagined' Sunday Times 'Boldly conceived, highly original... It's grey, streaked with crimson, shot through with that dream gold.' Norman Shrapnel, Guardian 'It's Hope's insistence on doing things the unexpected way that have made him the celebrated writer he is.' Sunday Express 'Hope's invention never flags and his scathing intelligence forcefully points up the sheer, outrageous contradictions of the system.' Mary Hope, Spectator 'The dazzling control of image and metaphor makes it a brilliant literary disquisition on dreams and truth, as well as on South Africa.' Robert Winder, Books & Bookmen"