Rob van der Veer Book order (chronological)

The internationally acclaimed novel, is the story of an idealistic medical graduate who arrives at an isolated South African hospital to take up a year's community service

"Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother -- her only family -- is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world -- including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong."--Book jacket (hardcover edition).

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as it goes on being written every day. An autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels.

A magical novel from a world class writer about a remarkable historical figure. In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of the soap-boiler Anna, and under the influence of the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is made the first Khoi or ‘Hottentot’ missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. Received into the fold of the Church, Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs. After being drawn into the fierce struggle between the missionaries and the Dutch colonists, he rises to some prominence and is appointed as missionary in a remote and arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people. In a heady mixture of comedy and tragedy, the real and the magical, and immersed in the ancient, earthy, African world of magic and dreams, Praying Mantis explores through the historical figure of Cupido Cockroach the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history.

For mange år siden hjemme i Polen skrev den nu 80-årige polsk-amerikanske immigrant Leo Gursky en kærlighedsroman tilegnet hans elskede. Af uransagelige veje dukker manuskriptet op i USA, og forandrer fuldstændig livet for den stilfærdige og ensomme mand og for den unge pige, som er opkaldt efter romanens hovedperson

Dr Hope Clearwater lives on an African beach reflecting on the complicated, violent and tragic events that brought her there her stormy marriage to John, a brilliant mathematician, her painstaking research work among the wild chimpanzees in the national park, her encounters with the chaos of the civil war. She examines her past and tries to find tranquility.