Mirko Bonné
Sealand Snowland
fiction, new
448 pp (103,692 words)
»Mirko Bonné's 'Sealand Snowland' is an outstanding novel that brings to mind Tolstoy, Dickens and 'Titanic'.«
Thomas Andre, Hamburger Abendblatt
Wales, 1921. The First World War and the Spanish flu have wrought devastation on Europe and brought it to its knees. Young Merce Blackboro escaped being sent to the frontline because he was in Antarctica, but he finds the cramped horizons of home oppressive after returning from Schackleton’s failed Endurance expedition. His suffering is only compounded when the love of his life, Ennid Muldoon, suddenly leaves to try her luck in America. With her on the same emigrant ship, among the continent’s huddled wretches, is the heavy-drinking tycoon Diver Robey, who fantasizes about connecting the Old World and the New World by air. The dreams of the passengers, rich and poor, are in danger of being shattered when the steamship runs into a huge snowstorm in the middle of the Atlantic. Merce must find a way to save Ennid and, in doing so, himself.
In his brilliant new Alfred Döblin Prize-nominated novel, Mirko Bonné tells a powerful, gripping tale of desperate longing a century before our own fragile times.
Reviews
»Mirko Bonné’s 'Sealand Schneeland' combines a Jack-London-style adventure novel with a part impressionistic, part mythical sounding of emotional depths.«
Helmut Böttinger, Deutschlandfunk Kultur
»An author who writes from the heart, and a melancholic of the highest calibre, though there is an undercurrent of childish impetuousness.«
Oliver Jungen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
»What is so satisfying in Mirko Bonné's novels is his ability to confront historical facts with the larger questions of life through his sensitive characterisation and use of language.«
Lisa Kreissler, NDR
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