Please do not turn away!Ĭomplements of the season! With warm heart I offer you wishes of good health from Africa. SUBJECT: Urgent Matter to the Attention of Mr. He had, rather naively, been taken in my an email scam (known in Nigeria as “419” after the criminal code which makes this kind of activity illegal), the type most of us would ignore or delete if they made their way through our SPAM filter. When the home he shares with his wife - also a retired school teacher - is repossessed by the bank, it appears that Mr Curtis had numerous, and hefty, financial debts. Initially, it is thought he may have hit a patch of black ice, but later, when it is revealed that his car made two attempts to leave the road, his death is chalked up as suicide. The central thread revolves around the death of Henry Curtis, a retired school teacher now working as a part-time watchman, who dies in an unusual traffic accident: his car, travelling at very high speeds, runs off the road one night and tumbles into a snowy ravine underneath a bridge. This rather ambitious novel has multiple storylines and a wide cast of characters. It is a heady mix of adventure story, crime fiction and global thriller - albeit with a distinctive 21st century twist. In short, it is about a Canadian man who gets stung by a Nigerian email scam, but it is also about the cultural and financial disparity between Africa and the West. Will Ferguson’s 419 is that kind of literature.
Fiction – hardcover Viking Books 399 pages 2012.įor me, the best kind of literature is the kind that makes you look at something afresh or takes you to a location (or time in history) that you would never normally visit.
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