The Snow Sleeper

Four linked stories about friendship ask what makes a person tell a story at all: need, compulsion, someone to listen, an occasion, a way of speaking. Each takes the form of an address, and in each the speaker lays bare, often with humour, how badly she or he once failed to understand another person. A creative-writing teacher giving her inaugural lecture describes the remarkable student who outmatched her. At a funeral, a dead writer’s friend speaks to the mourners about the man. A researcher on a study of homeless people reports on the articulate vagrant she misread. And in a lecture, a woman owns up to her share of the blame for what went wrong between her and a photographer. These eccentrics mirror one another, linked in an odd circle that pulls whoever reads them into a bigger story.

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About the book

Form

Short stories

Length

192 pages in the original

First published

2010 by Human & Rousseau

Author's age

56 when first published

ISBN

9780798151818 (original)

9780798179034 (Human & Rousseau, South Africa)