Why a Booktrail?
21C: Even the title evoked our interest. A story of fatwa, a writer and a Danish contract killing
The Serbian Dane
What you need to know before your trail
Sara Santander is an Iranian writer with a fatwa on her head. She lives in exile in London and hopes to live there in peace. And so she does until she is invited to work with the Danish branch of PEN a writers organisation which deals with prisoners.
And so the fatwa follows her to Copenhagen where someone knows where she is. When a price is put on her head and a Serbian orphan is chosen as the one to get his price.
She is given police protection and becomes increasingly close to the officer in charge of looking after her. But she has to be careful not to take her eye off the danger at large.
For as the day of the visit and meeting grows near, there might not only be people who want to hear free speech in the audience.
Travel Guide
The world of the fatwa on the freedom of the writer is a sad setting indeed and this is the world explored in the Serbian Dane.
The Serbian Dane is an orphan who is broken from the knowledge that his Yugoslavia is no more and is as broken as he is. Although he was born in Denmark he lives between worlds and cultures and is all too eager to agree to kill an Iranian author.
The tension as the day of the visit arrives is palpable for Denmark is a peace loving country and the work of the PEN is something that Lise is very keen to involve herself in. The freedom of speech is vital and it’s up to Per is going to prevent this tragedy. His closeness to Lise could compromise the very person he is trying to protect.
“Everything in Denmark seems so normal, but Per had a strong suspicion that they had an assassin in the city. The most critical point would come with the press conference out on Flakfortet”
A thriller of a story but with a real sense of the history and concept of the fatwa, of Yugoslavia and the war which has gone on for too long and broken up a lot more than a country.
Where Next?
