"A Treacherous Paradise," by Henning Mankell We forget, in these postcolonial times, that until comparatively recently the world was replete with empires. I was born in a corner of the British Empire, in West Africa, in a colony known as the Gold Coast, and the Africa of those days (the early 1950s) was divided among several empires: British, French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese (the Germans having been expelled in World War I and their colonies appropriated). The Portuguese had been there longest, since the 15th century, and their colonies - Mozambique, Angola and Guinea - were surprisingly integrated compared with others. The Portuguese had abolished slavery by the end of the 19th century, the death penalty had been rescinded (apart from cases of treason), and intermarriage between the settler class and the local Africans was tolerated, thereby earning the Portuguese colonies a louche reputation for decadence and immorality, particularly from the point of view of the British. A chapter of my second novel, "An Ice-Cream War," was set in Portuguese East Africa (as Mozambique was then known) during World War I, and as I did my research this attitude of prurient revulsion on the part of its British colonial neighbors was particularly striking. Henning Mankell's fascinating new novel, "A Treacherous Paradise," is largely set in Mozambique during the early years of the 20th century. But the story starts in Sweden. A young girl, Hanna Renstrom, is sent away from her isolated rural home because her family, confronting a famine, can no longer feed all its members. Assisted by a fur-­wearing, sleigh-driving businessman, Hanna secures a place as a cook on a Swedish steamship bound for Australia, hauling a cargo of timber. On the first leg of the journey she marries the third mate, who promptly dies of fever off the coast of Africa. Eyeing the shoreline and the Portuguese city of Lourenço Marques as the steamer takes on supplies, Hanna, a very young widow, only 18, spontaneously decides to jump ship and make a new life on the African continent. Now her adventures really begin. Mankell, as it happens, divides his time between Sweden and Mozambique and has great familiarity with both countries. His juxtaposition of the two - cold north versus hot south, Swedish temperament combining with African license - gives the novel its unusual flavor. It often reads like a fable or a folk tale, as this young Swedish girl encounters the cruel realities of African colonial life. Having fled her ship, she checks in to a hotel, only to discover that it's Lourenço Marques's most prestigious brothel. After just a few weeks the brothel keeper, a man called Vaz, asks her to marry him, which she does. Then he also dies, and Hanna finds herself running the business in his place - with considerable aplomb and success. The brothel, called O Paraiso ("The Paradise," giving the novel's title one of its nuances), is a curious, surreal place. Vaz's pet chimpanzee, Carlos, who wears clothes and serves refreshments to clients from a tray, becomes attached to Hanna and is a constant presence. Hanna also develops strong relationships with her "girls" and some of her clients, and the narrative reflects the bizarre, anecdotal, meandering nature of the brothel keeper's life. Increasingly wealthy and becoming a person of some local stature and influence, Hanna discovers that paradise can be treacherous. One young black woman who has killed her white brute of a husband is found dead, hideously mutilated, in her jail cell, despite Hanna's efforts to save her. With her strange paradise well and truly besmirched, Hanna finds some comfort in the arms of the victim's brother. Soon she leaves Lourenço Marques and travels north to Beira, Portuguese East Africa's second city, and there, in the Africa Hotel, she hides the diary she's been keeping and disappears. She is never heard of again until, almost a hundred years later, her diary is discovered. William Boyd's James Bond novel, "Solo," will be published in October.