Somewhere in the North African desert, a man with no memory tries to evade his armed pursuers. Who are they? What do they want from him? If he could just recall his own identity he might have a chance of working it out.
Elsewhere, four westerners are murdered in a hippy commune and a suitcase full of worthless currency goes missing. Enter a pair of very unenthusiastic detectives, a paranoid spy whose sanity has baked away in the sun, and a beautiful blonde American with a talent for being underestimated.
Sand is a gripping thriller - part Pynchon, part Le Carré, part Coen brothers - an unsettling, caustically funny tale of pursuit and madness.
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 9781782274414
Number of pages: 448
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm
So dazzling and original... a masterpiece... culminating in one of the greatest twists I've read - Daily Telegraph
Brilliant, anarchic, darkly comic... outrageous, clever... a bravura performance... the publishers have already referenced the Coen Brothers, and to that endorsement add Quentin Tarantino - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
Herrndorf... writes with an arresting cinematic vividness, and there is more than a whiff of Coen brothers' mayhem about the plot - Sunday Times
A careful subversion of the crime thriller genre... Sand is self-assured in its aim and delivery: an emphatic statement of intent - TLS
Herrndorf's enjoyment as he plays with our expectations is almost palpable - Glasgow Herald
[Wolfgang Herrndorf] wrote an earlier book, translated in English as Why We Took the Car, but Sand will be his last. It alone ought to assure him a place in twenty-first century literary history: it's bold, anarchic, blackly funny, and completely unafraid - Elle Thinks (blog)
Every element of his story is woven together masterfully, with grain upon grain of detail added to a landscape that never stops shifting underfoot. It's part Pynchon, part Beckett, a crime story told by Lewis Carroll in a particularly nihilistic mood - Spectator
German literary thriller that wears its intellectual cred boldly. Surreal comedy hangs a hallucinogenic pall over the reality of post-colonial North Africa in 1972, creating a confusing atmosphere around the central plot strand: who really killed the hippies in the desert commune? - Sunday Times Crime Club
A hit in Germany... part Coen bros, part John Le Carré - Sunday Star
Herrndorf has crafted something special here... the enigmatic Sand is the literary equivalent of a cactus: beautifully detailed, hard to get a grip on but sure to survive amid desolation and stand out sharply on a flat, monotone landscape where others sink into the dust - Hits the Fan (blog)
A thriller destined to please with lots of shocks and a tinge of pathos - Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
Undoubted literary merit... sustains uncertainty until the final pages, both for the reader as well as for the protagonist - Crime Review
Enigmatic and moving - Die Zeit
One of the most original and stylistically impressive German writers - Neue Zürcher Zeitung
A great writer. A smiling, friendly, sympathetic nihilism shines through his writing - Frankfurter Rundschau
He remains a witty and incredibly well read artist, who creates a great work of art as he juggles on a tightrope here with violence, death, doom, forgetting and the nothingness of existence - FAZ
A literary thriller... a terrific novel set in the desert - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
A gripping and marvelously comic thriller with a philosophical subtext - Focus
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