Namibian-born author Zirk van den Berg launches ‘Parts Unknown’

WRITER Zirk van den Berg will be in the country of his birth for the launch of his latest book, ‘Parts Unknown’, this weekend and next week.

Van den Berg, born at Walvis Bay and living in New Zealand for the past 20 years, is scheduled to be at the launch of ‘Parts Unknown’ at Book Den in Windhoek at 11h00 this Saturday, and at Swakopmunder Buchhandlung at the coast at 18h00 next Tuesday.

‘Parts Unknown’, simultaneously published in Afrikaans as ‘Die Vertes In’, is a historical novel set in German-ruled Namibia in 1905. In it, Van den Berg tells the story of an unlikely hero who discovers personal courage and principled humaneness when confronted by colonial injustice and violence after landing in German South West Africa, at a time of war and upheaval.

South African writer Harry Kalmer has described the book as “a love letter to a brutal landscape and the tale of one man’s defiance of inhumanity”.

Van den Berg’s previous books include ‘Half of One Thing’ (2014), set in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899 to 1902, and the crime thriller ‘Nobody Dies’ (2004), of which the prize-winning Afrikaans version, ”n Ander Mens’, was published in 2013.

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