Op ’n dag, ’n hond

After his wife Agnes, a well-known crime novelist, is knifed in a burglary at their seaside home, an unnamed retired teacher agrees to spend a year standing in at a Cape Town school. He rents a cottage behind the home of the principal, Liz, who lives with her friend Hazl, but a fresh start eludes him. Within days a storm, the news that a friend has been killed in a robbery, and an unruly Airedale called Bluf, loose from the animal shelter and suddenly in his classroom, upset his careful calm. Everything he meets calls up the past. Without religion to lean on, he tries to live by the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius, and to answer for himself in a country where violent death has become ordinary, with dark humour never far away.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Set in

South Africa

First published

2016 by Human & Rousseau

ISBN

9780798174329 (original)