Dry Season | Dan Smith

I really enjoyed this book, I could feel the dry red dust in the back of my throat and the glare of the constant Brazilian sun. In the back-blocks of the rain forest is a small town where not a lot happens, where people go when they want to forget and be forgotten.

In this town we meet a priest in denial, a renegade doctor and a reformed hooker...who all need each other to do away with the ghosts of their pasts and form a future for themselves.
There is a really languid feeling about this book, you are immersed in how it feels to be there for real, the torpor of the tropics, the destruction and desperation of the subsistence lifestyle of the people living on the fringes of society now, not in historical times.

The pace is slow until I felt something was about to happen. The tension builds to breaking point, the action speeds up to a cataclysmic event which brings the story to a close. A very satisfying read.



This book  reminded me of two of my favourite books The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene and most books by Gabriel Garcia Márques Chronicle of a death foretold.

This is Dan Smith's first novel. I'll be keen to read more.