Böcker av George Kanawaty

While the characters portrayed in this novel are fictious, the settings for the novel are based on historical events that took place during and shortly after the second world war. Hans, a German enlisted in the French Foreign Legion to fight the Nazi regime ends up as a German prisoner of war shipped to Canada. On release he meets Anne, a Canadian who helps him find a job in Canada. While both get married to others, they discover that they have far more in common than with their respective husbands and wives. Their relation develops into deep love, which they express through letters and through clandestine get togethers in Paris, where Hans works for an accounting multinational, as well as in Canada. By the time they are free, following the death of their respective partners they are already in their sixties, they decide it was too late to get married. Only after their death that their children discover the love letters and discover their love for each other. They decide to have Anne's cremated ashes buried in Hans's grave together with their love letters. Several non-fiction events are portrayed in this novel, which are little known to the general public, such as: Immigration to Canada in 1904; the French Foreign Legion; the dismantling of the German intellectual property after the war; the Student and workers uprising in France in 1968; the first US bombing of a Cambodian village shortly after the start of the Vietnam war and its aftermath.

In this Novel, our hero, Arthur, a regular church goer and a married father of two children, leaves his native Wales, UK, for a two years assignment with a charitable foundation on the Island of Mindanao, the Philippines. Exposed to a more permissive society than his own, he fends off various temptations until he meets Didi. His love for her breaks his ability to think rationally and he accepts to participate in a scheme developed by her shrewd brother that would free him to marry her. For a fee and with the help of the Islamic fundamentalist movement of Abu Sayyaf, active on the Island, his death is staged in a car accident where his body is presumably burnt beyond recognition. Arthur then marries Didi under an assumed name. With time his life becomes increasingly turbulent and circumstances force him to try and redeem his original identity. However, he finds the task daunting as he struggles to start a new life with Didi, back in the UK, and reconcile it with his own British family who gave him for dead twelve years earlier. Eventually, things fall into place with the various pieces fitting together. While the characters in this novel are fictious, their actions are woven in non-fiction real life settings, reflected in present day issues, such as the difficulties sometimes encountered in keeping up a married life, the behavior of persons as they move from one culture to another and the underlying causes and realities of fundamentalist insurgency movements.