Hamilton Wende’s House of War Launched in Johannesburg

October 19th, 2009 by Tracey

Short, sweet and snappy with a bevy of happy fans – the launch of Hamilton Wende’s new thriller House of War was an entertaining and light-hearted event last Thursday at Exclusive Books in Rosebank.

Wende’s fans were in a festive mood as they filled out the balcony in front of the store just before the launch. Inside, EB staff made ready the presentation screen and accompanying laptop promising guests something a little different.

And different it was – on two fronts. Instead of just speeches, Wende delighted guests with a photographic peek into his journey to northern Afghanistan, which inspired the book.

After introductions from Exclusive Books’ Maryanne Hancock, Penguin SA’s Tracey McDonald described how she felt when she first read House of War, “I couldn’t wait to get home every night just to carry on reading!” She described it as a “page-turner, thriller, action adventure, love story and historical novel”.

Using his photographs, Wende told how he had gone up to the Northern Alliance front lines, where the allies were shelling the Taliban in 2001. With great sense of humour he described this trip as “quite scary sometimes and at other times quite boring!”. While there he took a picture of a tiny outpost of a northern position and one of the soldiers pointed out that it was a city founded by “Iskander” or Alexander the Great. Intrigued, he did some research into Alexander in Afghanistan upon his return home. He said by an “extraordinary combination of personal coincidence… historical reality and experiences as a journalist” he found had something he could turn into a novel. And the photograph became the front cover of the book.

Wende ended by saying that “like a good mystery” readers will need to go through different portals to enjoy his book – one by first buying it and two by actually reading it!

The second and very significant difference to this launch was the attendance and inclusion of several hearing impaired Exclusive Books Fanatics fans. Ayesha Tilly is a regular subscriber to the EB Fanatics newsletters. She spearheaded the night’s initiative to have a translator at the event to enable hearing-impaired book fans to enjoy a launch. The same as for hearing readers, books are a rich and wonderful entertainment source for the hearing impaired – and Tilly she firmly believes they should be afforded the opportunity to enjoy book launches too. She and Maryanne Hancock are looking at growing this initiative in the coming months.

Sign-language interpreter Delphin Hlungwane did an excellent job, at one point actively manoeuvring around Wende to make sure her listeners heard her!