J. M. Ledgard

Award-winning foreign correspondent’s cerebral spy novel-cum-love story exposes humanity’s tenuous hold on a vast and relentless world.

Submergence

A Novel

Giraffe

From the author of Submergence comes a digital-original triptych of essays that examine humanity in the modern age. Terra Firma Triptych begins in a wilderness in South Sudan. J. M. Ledgard is there in search of a still point, untouched by humankind--a goal complicated by the contingent of armed rangers accompanying him. Next, a trip through Rwanda--taking a borrowed car toward crocodile-infested lakes near the border with Burundi--a road trip that unexpectedly ends up at the site of the country's proposed future in the sky. And finally Ledgard takes us straight into a vision of that very future, of a continent poised to take advantage of current and near-future technological advances--a vision that feels Star Trek fanciful at first, then not just practical but necessary. As a novelist, Ledgard is celebrated for his ability to allow his imagination and ideas to fly wide and free even as he grounds his stories in contemporary political reality, earning simultaneous comparisons to both W. G. Sebald and John le Carré. As a journalist, he has covered East Africa for The Economist for more than a decade. In Terra Firma Triptych, Ledgard is able to summon the searching, soaring, poetic voice of the novelist and to latch it to the gritty vision of the reporter on the ground to show us a world in which connectivity has become paramount, in which isolation and uncharted landscapes verge on obsolete, and yet new frontiers still beckon. Each panel of the triptych informs the one before--each goads us forward even as it questions the acceleration. What is certain is that we are hurtling into tomorrow together, and our potential depends on the generosity of our imagination.

When Robots Fly

Terra Firma Triptych

Told from multiple points of view, a herd of giraffes is captured in Africa, brought to a small Czech town, and then systematically slaughtered by the secret police, in story offering parallels to Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

Riitta Jalonen

Kristiina Louhi

Sari and her mother take a trip up to the Arctic to fulfill her mother's promise to return Tundra Mouse, an alpine mouse-ear plant she picked when she was a girl.

Tundra Mouse Mountain

In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water engineer to spy on al-Quaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions and forced marches through arid Somali badlands.

In April 1975, forty-seven giraffes were executed in a zoo in a small Czechoslovakian town. There are no records of the event. This strange and beautiful novel tells their story from the moment of their capture in Africa, to the night when they are secretly shot one by one. "From the Hardcover edition."

J. M. Ledgard

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