About this item
When his girlfriend takes a job as a schoolteacher in northern Thailand, Mischa Berlinski goes along for the ride, working as little as possible for one of Thailand's English-language newspapers. One evening a fellow expatriate tips him off to a story. A charismatic American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, has been found dead-a suicide-in the Thai prison where she was serving a fifty-year sentence for murder.Motivated first by simple curiosity, then by deeper and more mysterious feelings, Mischa searches relentlessly to discover the details of Martiya's crime. His search leads him to the origins of modern anthropology-and into the family history of Martiya's victim, a brilliant young missionary whose grandparents left Oklahoma to preach the Word in the 1920s and never went back.
About the Author
Mischa Berlinski is the author of novel Fieldwork, a finalist for the National Book Award. He has written for the New York Review of Books about Haitian politics, has tried to buy a zombie for Men's Journal, and investigated a woman who married a snake for Harper's Magazine. His writing has appeared in the Best American Essays and the Best American Travel Writing.
He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Addison M. Metcalf Award.
