Bøker av Troy Blacklaws

Two characters navigate the post-apartheid South African landscape in this haunting story of the injustice that still simmers below the country's surfaceIn Troy Blacklaws's ambitious novel, the lives of two African men run parallel, exposing the tensions that rumble at South Africa's post-apartheid core. Jerusalem is a young poet and student whose stubborn father will no longer pay for his rambling studies. Half Jewish, half Muslim, Jerusalem is forced from Cape Town to a distant harbor village by his father, who believes a stint selling curios to tourists will right his wandering ways. Meanwhile, Jabulani loses his teaching job in Zimbabwe after mocking President Mugabe and must move south to start a new life. But his life across the border is tainted by the harsh truth that racism isn't gone; it's just taken another form. As the two men's lives merge, their stories reveal the paradoxes of the South African experience.

Troy Blacklaws's follow-up to his internationally acclaimed Karoo Boy is the bittersweet tale of a South African boy coming of age during apartheidGecko's childhood is one of sheltered, almost magical innocence on a farm in Natal. He spends his days taking barefoot expeditions with his dogs and his nights listening to Springbok Radio, unaware of the cruel force in his life that apartheid will soon become. With the start of high school in the Cape, Gecko is thrust into a political and personal awakening that is both tragic and heartfelt. With conscription into the South African army looming over him, Gecko's future is as uncertain as his country's. Blood Orangeevokes the absurdity, longing, and fear of growing up white in the last decades of apartheid.