Eugene

Eugene grew up in the Boland of the 1960s and 1970s, a bookish boy who once stole a classmate’s copy of War and Peace, and became a widely read journalist who now passes for upper middle class, though he still knows the gangsters and crooks of the townships he came from. Long after the friendships of his youth with Alan, Huey and Jenny fell apart in Hillbrow, he stands accused of murder. Moving back and forth in time across six parts, the novel assembles his life like a puzzle: a childhood in a Boland ‘kampong’, then years in the struggle against apartheid, when a vigilante preacher and some Free State farmers beat and humiliate him. Since then a baboon appears each time he is in trouble, and fact and the work of trauma or guilt grow hard to tell apart.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

256 pages in the original

Genres

Crime (assigned by AI)

Set in

South Africa

First published

2022 by Human & Rousseau

ISBN

9780798182645 (original)