Strafjaart

The narrator, a naive, nameless man of forty, is writing a thesis on ships lost off the South African coast. When Lizette, his father’s much younger sister, fifty and gay, goes to Pollsmoor for twelve months for fraud, visiting her pulls him into the lives of prisoners and their families. He grows close to Edith, one of whose sons is inside while another will come to matter to him, meets people who run rehabilitation work and joins Imbadu, a course for young male inmates that asks what makes a man. Visitors, warders and former prisoners unwind together at a bar called Walk the line. With his wife expecting their first child, he sees himself, his marriage and everyone around him as wrecks, and freedom and confinement begin to blur.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Set in

South Africa

First published

2019 by Penguin Books

ISBN

9781485903888 (original)