Little Caesar
About this ebook
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2009 AKO LITERATURE PRIZE
Ludwig Unger’s life held such promise. His parents were artists and, from an early age, his own musical genius had marked him out for a stellar career in the world’s concert halls. In his mother’s imagination, Ludwig is already on the way to surpassing her most ambitious dreams for him. But in reality, and for now, he’s playing in local cocktail bars and the two of them are living alone in a storm-lashed clifftop cottage in East Anglia. As the forceful winter seas bash away at the coastline, and Ludwig plunks away at the piano, he begins to tell a woman his story: a story of beauty and decay, of a child’s faith and parental betrayal, and of the importance, in the end, of self-sacrifice.
PRAISE FOR TOMMY WIERINGA
‘Tommy Wieringa's ambitious novel is a brilliant exploration of the uneasy transition from adolescence into adulthood — the restlessness, yearning for stability, irrational decisions and erotic obsessions.’ The Independent (UK)
‘Though anchored by emotional authenticity, Little Caesar reimagines the coming-of-age novel as surreal picaresque, the search for adult identity a wild and elusive quest with allusions to everything.’ The Sydney Morning Herald
About the author
Tommy Wieringa was born in 1967 and grew up partly in the Netherlands, and partly in the tropics. He began his writing career with travel stories and journalism, and is the author of several internationally bestselling novels. His fiction has been longlisted for the Booker International Prize, shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford/Weidenfeld Prize, and has won Holland’s Libris Literature Prize.
Sam Garrett has translated some fifty novels and works of nonfiction. He has won prizes and appeared on shortlists for some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, and is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors’ Vondel Prize for Dutch–English translation.
