Archive for the ‘Fiction based on Real Event’ Category

TEA TIME FOR THE TRADITIONALLY BUILT by Alexander McCall Smith

Not a believer that change is entirely for the better in Botswana society, Mma Precious Ramotswe, the “traditionally built” owner of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency in Gaborone, has decided that cars are among the biggest agents of change, making people lazy. She has therefore decided to walk the two miles each way to her office, located beside the garage where her husband Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni operates a car repair service. She secretly admits, however, that the real reason she is walking is that her beloved little white van, now twenty-two years old, is making strange noises, and she fears that when Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni hears them that he will decide her little van can no longer be repaired.

May 27, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Africa, Botswana, Fiction based on Real Event  No Comments

THE SECRET SPEECH by Tom Rob Smith

Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a loyal member of the state security commission in the Stalinist Soviet Union of the nineteen-fifties, was introduced as a conflicted crime investigator in Tom Rob Smith’s first novel, CHILD 44. In that enormously entertaining thriller, Smith provided the backdrop of the authoritarian state that brooks no dissent, where security apparatchiks like Leo Demidov must bend their own judgement regarding others’ innocence and guilt, and must become ruthless instruments of its repression. In The Secret Speech, Smith’s second novel, it is 1956. Not only has Stalin been dead for three years, but his successor Khrushchev has just given his famous speech of February 1956.

May 21, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Fiction based on Real Event, KGB, Russia, Thriller  One Comment