On the rooftop of a theater in an African port, Nelio, a ten-year-old boy--a leader of street kids, rumored to be a healer and a prophet and possessed of a strangely ancient wisdom--tells his unforgettable story over the course of nine nights.

Henning Mankell is an internationally bestselling author who has received numerous awards, including the Crime Writers' Association's Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are global bestsellers and have been adapted into the PBS Masterpiece Mystery! series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. The New Press has published English translations of ten of his Wallander mysteries-Faceless Killers, The White Lioness, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, One Step Behind, Firewall, The Dogs of Riga, Before the Frost, The Man Who Smiled, and The Pyramid-the novels The Return of the Dancing Master, Chronicler of the Winds, Depths, Kennedy's Brain, The Eye of the Leopard, Italian Shoes, Daniel, and The Shadow Girls; and the nonfiction I Die, But My Memory Lives On: The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project. Born in 1948, Mankell grew up in the Swedish village of Sveg. He now divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as a director at Teatro Avenida.