White Lies

White Lies
Dexter Petley

‘Dexter Petley perfect writer’s eye gives us a candenced love story…Gripping, dryly hysterical, “White Lies” reeks of beauty and human truth.’ Alan WarnerA brilliant, bittersweet love story set against a corrupt east African landscape.Nobody believes in love at first sight. Norman didn’t until he read about ‘Joy, The Gold Panning Missionary’ in an African magazine and set out to find her. But it isn’t easy to find love in East Africa in the early 1980s. This is a region with a heavy colonial hangover: Obote’s government teeters on the brink of collapse, petty crime and corruption are rife in the streets and Norman, the impressionable young Englishman, makes slow progress towards the woman he intends to marry.A decade on and many thousands of miles from Africa, Norman is trying to shape a new life. Joy has walked out, leaving him to their damp tumbledown farmhouse in a rural corner of northern France. He is a desperate, broken man. Alone, he sifts the wreckage of his marriage from the wreckage of this ramshackle farm and tries to plot a way out, some sort of future.It’s only when Norman decides to go back to Africa – not for love this time, but to settle old scores – that he finally sees what he must do, however dark and terrifying an act that is.In his own unique prose, Dexter Petley carefully laces Norman’s African and French stories together to create a delicate portrait of an Englishman abroad, a brutal depiction of the corruption that colonialism breeds and, above all, a brilliant, bittersweet love story.

WHITE LIES

Dexter Petley

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_04f3f402-1ae8-5e49-a206-3074fdd4b950)

This edition first published in 2016

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by

Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Copyright © Dexter Petley 2003

The right of Dexter Petley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007135103

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN 9780007392667

Version: 2016-08-10

DEDICATION (#ulink_eb089f8c-3e37-5711-85b8-8d40f456d588)

FOR LAURE

CONTENTS

Cover (#u8748bc9e-e4c4-5e95-9f22-a941aafb34ea)

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Dedication (#uaf0e6187-6473-52bd-a332-4ac2a158aea7)

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