Michela Wrong - Borderlines

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Borderlines: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The debut novel by a British writer with nearly two decades of African experience – a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events.British lawyer Paula Shackleton is mourning a lost love when a small man in a lemon-coloured suit accosts her over breakfast in a Boston hotel. Winston Peabody represents the African state of North Darrar, embroiled in a border arbitration case with its giant neighbour. He needs help with the hearings in The Hague, Paula needs to forget the past.She flies to the state’s capital determined to lose herself in work, but soon discovers that even jobs taken with the purest intentions can involve moral compromise. Taking testimony in scorching refugee camps, delving into the colonial past, she becomes increasingly uneasy about her role. Budding friendships with a scarred former rebel and an idealistic young doctor whittle away at her pose of sardonic indifference, until Paula finds herself taking a step no decent lawyer should ever contemplate.Michela Wrong has been writing about Africa for two decades. In this taut legal thriller, rich with the Horn of Africa’s colours and aromas, she probes the motives underlying Western engagement with the continent, questioning the value of universal justice and exploring how history itself is forged. Above all her first novel is the story of a young woman’s anguished quest for redemption.

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Copyright Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Chapter 1 - фото 1

Copyright Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Chapter 1 - фото 2

Copyright Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Acknowledgements About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

Copyright © Michela Wrong 2015

Cover photograph (map) © Shutterstock.com

Michela Wrong asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008147402

Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008123000

Version: 2015-12-08

Dedication Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Acknowledgements About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

For Jessica, who had to wait her turn

Nothing that mankind has accomplished to this date equals the replacement of war by court rulings, based on international law.

Andrew Carnegie,

US steel magnate and philanthropist,

August 1913

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph Nothing that mankind has accomplished to this date equals the replacement of war by court rulings, based on international law. Andrew Carnegie, US steel magnate and philanthropist, August 1913

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

If you fly often, this may have happened to you. You’re stuck in Economy, folded awkwardly against a window, legs twined like pipe-cleaners, half awake. It’s dark outside, the window blind has been pulled down, and you’re where you hate being: five miles high, defying the laws of gravity and plain common sense. The slight ache in your feet, which have been pressing upwards into the bottom of the seat in front (someone, after all, has to do the hard work of keeping this machine aloft), confirms this fact. You are bitterly aware that the atmosphere inside the plane has turned into one troubled communal fart. And then, quite suddenly, it happens. With no real warning – perhaps a brief bumpiness you assume to be high-altitude turbulence – the plane makes impact . For a moment, you know that you are dying, because this mid-air collision, so high above the Earth, will leave no survivors, no body parts even. You convulse in your seat. You gasp aloud and your neighbour gives you a worried glance. And then your brain executes a massive feat of intellectual recalibration. You flick up the blind with a trembling hand. That’s the ground outside the window – zipping past you terrifyingly fast, it’s true, but in a controlled and orderly manner. This is a landing, you idiot. Sleeping, you missed the change in engine tone, the dipping of the nose, the minutes of what feel like freefall, the clunk of landing gear descending.

Landing in mid-air. A sobering exercise in shattered assumptions, the shock realisation of ludicrously false premises. When I look back on my time in Lira, it often seems like a version of that heart-stopping mid-flight experience, extended over the space of a year. Well, what can I say? Some people are just a bit slow to catch on.

1 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Nothing that mankind has accomplished to this date equals the replacement of war by court rulings, based on international law. Andrew Carnegie, US steel magnate and philanthropist, August 1913 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Acknowledgements About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher

14 November 2005

By two a.m. the glare was really beginning to bother me. African airports don’t, on the whole, go in for soft lighting, and Lira International was no exception. I didn’t need a mirror to know what I looked like in the greenish-white light given off by the fluorescent strip running the length of the ceiling: baggy-eyed, sallow, prematurely old.

I lay on the stiff acrylic carpet, my bag under one ear as a makeshift pillow, hands between my knees, pretending to ignore my guard. He was actually in the next room, but the door had been propped open, and since most of the wall separating the two rooms was glass, he could see me without leaving his desk, where he sat reading a newspaper, occasionally sipping a glass of dark tea.

Earlier, I had gone through the outrage, shocked innocence and I-demand-an-explanation routine that seems de rigueur when a young white woman is suddenly, mysteriously, diverted from a path leading to a boarding gate, the trundle across the tarmac in the warm night air and then, aah , the microcosm of Western civilisation that is the modern aircraft, a little bubble of agreed conventions and soothing yogic rituals. I’d declaimed at considerable length on my key role in the Legal Office of the President. I’d dropped my boss’s name, demanded to speak to the presidential adviser and brandished my files, to emphasise how vital it was that I reach The Hague in time for the announcement of a historic ruling that would shape his country’s future.

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