Dark Company

A Novel in Ten Rainy Nights

Gert Loschutz

Translated by Samuel P. Willcocks

 

5 x 8 inches, 224pp. May 2013

ISBN : 9780857420855

Rs  425.00 (HB)
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“Of course I had to end up here . . .”

 

Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-bargeman who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the landlocked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood: his apprenticeship in the cold halls of the Royal Naval College in London; the dangers of the mean streets and waterfront of New York in the 1970s, and Poland under martial law; Germany after the reunification, when for a year or so it seemed that the whole country drifted rudderless, drawn by the current of history to who knows where. In this novel from Gert Loschütz, Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warnings of his grandfather: Beware the dark company! This mysterious band of men and women dressed in black cast a shadow over his story, as he wrestles with the secrets, the unplumbed depths of his soul, the hazards lurking below a seemingly placid surface, and throughout it all, the rain, falling night after night.

 

Dark Company is a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird fiction which claims its roots in Kafka and Herbert Rosendorfer.

 

 

Gert Loschutz is the author of many short stories, children's books and novels, most recently Das erleuchtete Fenster.

 

Samuel P. Willcocks was the 2010 winner of the German Ambassador's Award for Literary Translation (London). He translates from Czech, German, Romanian and Slovene into English and lives in Giurgiu on the Danube with his family.

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