Author Description

Lost Ground is a richly textured novel set in contemporary South Africa. The murder of a beautiful woman shatters the rural village peace of Alfredville, and her husband, the police station commander, is jailed as chief suspect. Her cousin Peter, a freelance writer in London, returns to South Africa for the first time in decades - unsettled, curious, but also in search of a career-defining story.As Peter abandons the neatly patterned story he had planned and is forced to participate in a community that he once despised, he begins to reconsider his place in the world. In search of Desirée's story, he now starts to rewrite his own - till events take an even more shocking turn... Lost Ground explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go. In Invisible Furies Christopher Turner returns to Paris after a thirty-year absence. He is here to extricate his best friend's son Eric from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger - or so it is assumed, at home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend himself.As Christopher comes to know and enjoy this ambiguous world, he finds his moral categories challenged: is beauty a trap for the innocent young, or a self-validating, even ennobling attribute of a fully lived life? Responding to the gentle appeal of Beatrice, he feels ever more strongly that the young man's place is in Paris with her, rather than on his father's farm in Franschhoek. But Eric has ideas of his own . . . Exploring, as in the widely applauded Lost Ground, the tensions between the fatherland and a larger world, Michiel Heyns turns an ironic eye on the most seductive city on earth, and traces with humour and insight the invisible furies of the heart. In A Sportful Malice a young South African literary sc