The book maks a slow start but you suspect it's because Mankell wants to really get beneath the skin of his two main characters. It is worth being patient. Daniel in particualr is brilliantly portrayed, through Mankell's device of giving him an inner world through which his actions are guided by the land of his now dead parents. Mankell not only evokes his connections with his past, but shows how Daniel is inextricably linked to the desert environment from which he comes. He interprets the new world of nineteenth century Sweden, which to him looks contrived and artificial, by reference to the real world of the Kalahari, to which he is ineluctably drawn. Mankell sets up an interesting tension between the growing warmth between man and boy, on the one hand, and their competing desires, on the other: the man's for a reputation and an income, and Daniel's to be back where he belongs.