The Constant Gardener
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: September 8, 2017 4:16 PM | Last Updated: September 8, 2017
John le Carré
Tessa Quayle-young, beautiful, and dearly beloved to husband Justin, is gruesomely murdered in northern Kenya. When Justin sets out on a personal odyssey to uncover the mystery of her death, what he finds could make him not only a suspect but also a target for Tessa's killers.
A master chronicler of the betrayals of ordinary people caught in political conflict, John le Carré portrays the dark side of unbridled capitalism as only he can. In The Constant Gardener he tells a compelling, complex story of a man elevated through tragedy as Justin Quayle — amateur gardener, aging widower and ineffectual bureaucrat — discovers his own natural resources and the extraordinary courage of the woman he barely had time to love. (From Penguin Canada)
From the book
The news hit the British High Commission in Nairobi at nine-thirty on a Monday morning. Sandy Woodrow took it like a bullet, jaw rigid, chest out, smack through his divided English heart. He was standing. That much he afterwards remembered. He was standing and the internal phone was piping. He was reaching for something, he heard the piping so he checked himself in order to stretch down and fish the receiver off the desk and say, "Woodrow." Or maybe, "Woodrow here." And he certainly barked his name a bit, he had that memory for sure: of his voice sounding stroppy: "Woodrow here," his own perfectly decent name, but without the softening of his nickname Sandy, and snapped out as if he hated it, because the High Commissioner's usual prayer meeting was slated to start in thirty minutes prompt, with Woodrow, as Head of Chancery, playing in-house moderator to a bunch of special-interest prima donnas, each of whom wanted sole possession of the High Commissioner's heart and mind.
From The Constant Gardener by John le Carré ©2001. Published by Penguin Canada.