Thirteen-year-old Benjamin flies into Liberian Monrovia to visit his father, an international aid worker. His father, however, doesn’t show up at the airport to pick him up. For Benjamin, this is the beginning of an adventurous journey through a foreign world contrastive to the European way of living. Searching for his father, he gets to know same aged blind Bo and spoilt Brilliant. For three days – and almost 700 pages! – readers follow the three protagonists through Monrovia and in the bush. Rainer Merkel combines adventure story, travelogue, coming-of-age novel and urban novel. By the way, the author knows both Liberia and the world of international aid workers from his own experience as he worked in the country’s only mental hospital from 2008 to 2009.
