NORSTEDTs ageNcy

Fiction
En storm kom från paradiset
A Storm Blew in From Paradise
by Johannes Anyuru
September 2012, 248 pages
Senior Editor: Håkan Bravinger
Sample translation in English available
Rights sold to:
Btb, Germany • Actes Sud, France • Press, Norway
Gyldendal, Denmark • Schildts & Söderströms, Finland
De Geus, the Netherlands
World Editions, world English
35 000 copies sold!
Nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award!
A Storm Blew in From Paradise
“He doesn’t remember what has happened to
him, what he’s doing on this train. The full moon
hangs low above the horizon, a gray disc. He
can see the craters, the sandy seas. He doesn’t
remember who he is. The moon, it reminds him
of something. Of clouds. Of the wind. He doesn’t
remember. He doesn’t remember the story.”
A young man, P, is sitting in a small cage
in a Tanzanian jail. His greatest dream is to
fly. Up until quite recently everything had
looked promising. He had come to Greece to
be trained at the Hellenic Air Force Academy
in Dhekelia, just outside Athens, chosen
to be a pilot and an officer in the Ugandan
Air Force. Soon he would be soaring through
the skies in an unpainted, polished aluminium
MIG-21.
But then, on January 26, 1971, the news of a
coup in his homeland reaches him. Idi Amin
has taken power. Shortly thereafter all Ugandan
aviation cadets are ordered home by
Amin’s state machine. It is at that moment
that P makes his life’s most crucial choice:
to defect and stay in Greece. After that,
nothing turns out like he imagined. He’s not
allowed to fly in Europe, and in despair he
accepts a job in Zambia as a crop dusting
pilot. But as he lands he is taken into custody
and transported to a Tanzanian jail.
P is afraid; afraid that he will be sent back to
Uganda and be prosecuted for treason; afraid
that he will die here without anybody knowing;
afraid that they have already killed his
family back home.
Over a period of many years, we follow P’s
struggles – as a refugee, as a military camp
prisoner, as a man on the run. He never stops
dreaming of a life as a pilot, but he’ll never
get to fly again. Johannes Anyuru has written
a thrilling novel about his own father’s
fate, a read which stays with you for a long
time. This is a novel about survival, and a
continued >
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