Karoo Boy is the most colourful book I’ve ever read. It is the perfect introduction to both the magic and the mystery of South Africa’ Chris Martin Coldplay
‘Blacklaws evokes the quiet insularity of seaside Muizenberg with an affecting nostalgia, and his Karoo town has the authentic feel of countless one-café settlements along the road from Cape Town to Johannesburg … It does evoke an era, but less the last four years of the 1970s than that strange twilight of a world closed in on itself which was south Africa in the late 1980s and early 90s … [Blacklaws’s] may, in time, turn out to be the voice we have been expecting from his generation’ Andrew Van Der Vlies TLS
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Christmas Day, Muizenberg beach, Cape Town. A freak accident leaves Douglas’s twin brother dead, and his family’s fragmentation begins. Wracked by guilt, his father leaves. His mother packs up their home and takes her son to a tiny backwater town, where she withdraws into her painting. Douglas, a city kid in an insular community, makes only two friends: harum-scarum Marika, on the brink of womanhood, and the old Xhosa garage worker, Moses, with his dream of putting together a car from spare parts and driving to Cape Town, his longed-for promised land. Through Blacklaws’ powerful prose, dreams and reality meet in a lyrical novel of small town South Africa that has universal resonance.
