J.M. LEDGARD

In 1975, on the eve of May Day, secret police sealed off a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town and ordered the destruction of the largest captive herd of giraffes in the world. Ledgard tells the story of the giraffes from the moment of their capture in Africa to their deaths behind the Iron Curtain. We see them first through the eyes of Emil, a haemodynamicist (he studies blood flow in vertical creatures) who is chosen to accompany them from Hamburg into Czechoslovakia. There Amina, a sleepwalker, a factory girl, glimpses their arrival and goes each day to gaze up at them. She is with them at the end, blinding them with a torch, as Jiri, a sharpshooter, brings them down one by one. Giraffe is a story about strangeness, about creatures that are alien. It is also a story about captivity, about Czechoslovakia, a middling totalitarian state in the middle of Europe that is itself asleep, under a spell, a nation of sleepwalkers.

In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water engineer to spy on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions and forced marches through arid Somali badlands.

James More es un ingeniero hidráulico que ha sido tomado como rehén en Somalia por los terroristas yihadistas, que sospechan que es un espía británico. Danielle Danny Flinders es una biomatemática que trabaja en un proyecto de inmersion en las aguas mas profundas de los oceanos para demostrar su teoria sobre el origen de la vida en el planeta. Ambos se conocen en un aislado hotel de la costa atlantica francesa, donde preparan sus peligrosas misiones, y encuentran, el uno en el otro, al amor de sus vidas. Ahora, separados, Danny inicia su peligrosa inmersion al fondo del oceano sin saber si James sigue vivo.