Louis de Bernieres

Louis de Bernières was born in London in 1954. After graduating in Philosophy from the University of Manchester, he took his MA at the University of London. He has held various jobs: landscape gardener, mechanic, officer cadet at Sandhurst and schoolteacher in both Colombia and England.

De Bernières’ first novel, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, was published in 1990 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, a prizer also won by his second book, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord. His third book, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, was published in 1992. These works were influenced by de Bernières’ experiences in Colombia and together make up his ‘Latin American trilogy’.

In 1993 de Bernières was selected by Granta magazine as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists. His next book, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, was published the following year. This novel became a phenomenal bestseller with sales helped by word-of-mouth recommendations. It was translated into thirty-five languages and a major film based on it was released in 2001.

De Bernières has also written a play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World (2001), and a novella, Red Dog (2001). His last novel was Birds Without Wings (2004), shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread Novel Award and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His new novel, A Partisan's Daughter, is published in 2008.

As well as gardening and repairing old cars when he is not writing, Louis de Bernieres plays the flute, mandolin, clarinet and guitar, and performs regularly with the Antonius Players.  He lives in Norfolk.

A Partisan’s Daughter

De Bernières’ new novel is a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad. Chris is bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage to a woman he refers to as the Great White Loaf. He has one daughter and they live in Sutton. Chris works as a travelling salesman for a medical company. In his forties, he's a stranger to the 1970s youth culture of London, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito's partisans. She's in her twenties, but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And though she's not a hooker, when she's propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway. She tells him flippantly that she has worked a prostitute and been paid £500.

Over the next few months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She's a fast-talking Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. Her father is a key figure in her life and in one of her stories she tells Chris that he was her first lover but she was the one who had forced sex with her father. Chris takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even matter?

Chris becomes sexually obsessed with Roza and secretly saves every penny to be able to afford the £500 to sleep with her, never for a moment thinking that she would love him. But as the book progresses they began to fulfil a real need in each other and fall in love, without ever admitting it. One night Roza tells Chris that the next time he comes back she has something really important to tell him. He goes to the pub with a friend on the way to see her and turns up drunk in the middle of the night. All his pent-up sexual frustration and unhappiness comes out as anger as he abuses her, calling her a bitch, and implying she’s a whore, when he tells her to go home. He then offers her the £500 before stumbling out of the door. When he goes back a few days later, she has disappeared and he never sees her again. She’s left one note in Serbian, which he eventually has translated and it reads ‘I thought you loved me’. The deeply moving novel of their unlikely love is a brilliantly subtle commentary on storytelling: its seductions and powers, and its ultimately unavoidable dangers.