DEPTHS, by Henning Mankell, and Laurie Thompson (Editor), is published in hardback by Harvill Secker, priced £16.99. Available Now. Islands have always played an emotive part in literary history, from Tom and Huck's exuberant adventures on the Mississippi to William Golding's enthralling Lord of the Flies.
So one sensed Henning Mankell was always going to be onto a winner when he set his latest psychological thriller, Depths amid the countless rocky outcrops which form the Stockholm Archipelago.
Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is a naval seaman charged with
making crucial depth soundings around the islands as the First War World War prepares to engulf Scandinavia.
But his obsessively regimented life is shattered for ever when he discovers a young woman, Sara Fredrika, living alone on an apparently uninhabited island deep in the Archipelago.
Tobiasson-Svartman becomes haunted by the chance encounter, and is intent on finding any possible excuse to abandon his orderly existence and return to the island, with tragic consequences.
Mankell's powerful and vivid prose has lost nothing in its translation from Swedish, and confirms his status as one of Europe's premier writers in the psychological thriller genre.
His short, stabbing chapters perfectly help portray the slow unravelling of the main character, as thoughts of Sara Fredrika prompt him to reconsider his very reason for being.
At times Tobiasson-Svartman is a hard character to warm to, and therein lies the biggest failing of Mankell's book, although the sheer force of the plot - and its setting - make it a certain winner from start to finish.
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