Freight Dogs

Description

1996: in a Ugandan dive bar, the 'freight dogs' gather. An anarchic group of mercenary pilots from Texas, Russia, Kenya and Belgium who transport weapons between warring African nations, without allegiance. And tonight they have a new recruit - Manu, a 19-year-old cowherd fleeing Congo's bloody war. Taken in by this band of unlikely brothers, he's soon seeing his vast country from above and falling in love with flying. But no matter how fast he flies, trouble follows closely behind. And when the past erupts back into this new life, Manu is forced to leave behind African skies for the chilly embrace of northern Europe. Will Manu be able to reinvent himself yet again? And is Belgian volcanologist Anke Desseaux the answer to his problems - or simply another one of them? From the writer of The Last King of Scotland comes an unforgettable story of survival - about how to live and love after trauma, set against a backdrop of world-shaking conflict.

Giles Foden was born in 1967 and spent much of his early life in Africa. For ten years, he was an editor and writer for the Times Literary Supplement and the Guardian, and his work has since been published in Granta, Vogue, Esquire, The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveller, where he is a contributing editor. His fiction includes The Last King of Scotland, Ladysmith, Zanzibar and Turbulence. The Last King of Scotland was made into an Oscar-winning feature film in 2006.

The most original and interesting novelist of his generation - SCOTSMAN Audacious, shrewd and spirited - William Boyd on THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND Rich, complex and immensely satisfying . . . [Foden's] fiction is so convincing that it is hard not to feel that you are reading the real inside story - Evening Standard on ZANZIBAR Foden writes of Africa with great beauty, even love; his sense of place is unerring, his details exact, felicitous, often rising to the luminosity of poetry - THE TIMES A fascinating read: Wilbur Smith meets William Boyd in the warm seas and spice-scented air of Zanzibar - NEW STATEMAN on ZANZIBAR