Award-winning Michiel Heyns returns with 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. On checking into the Queen's Hotel he finds that things are not as straightforward as he imagined, and South Africa is not as he left it. His carefully ordered world is thrown into turmoil as his trip dredges up a long-abandoned past, forcing him to question the assumptions so easily held from the comfort of his London flat. He meets a mixture of locals, visitors, vagrants and migrants, but most momentously, Peter discovers that his bosom friend from school, Bennie Nienaber, is still in Alfredville - and is in fact now, acting station commander at the local police station. Peter re-establishes an awkward friendship with his erstwhile friend and the two warily circle each other, sharing reminiscences that hint at a bond much deeper than nostalgia. 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 Desiree's story, he now starts to rewrite his own - till events take an even more shocking turn...This book explores questions of xenophobia and prejudice, of national, sexual and personal identity, and what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By J. Currie
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Paperback
South Africa post apartheid is no simple place, the rainbow nation presenting its inhabitants with the problems of accommodating old prejudice with new reality. This is not just true of the great conurbations like Johannesburg, but even the small towns or dorps of the Little Karoo, like the quiet backwater of Alfredville in which this novel is set.
The narrator, a freelance journalist, who abandoned his home in Alfredville to avoid military service for the apartheid regime, and who has lived and worked in London for over twenty years, makes a return to his hometown. He has come to research the circumstances of the murder of his cousin, apparently by her black husband, who also happens to be chief of police and a former ANC activist. As he blunders about a town he once knew and interacts with new acquaintances and friends from the past, he uncovers quite a different story from what he had expected.
The book's title could refer to a number of lost grounds: the retreat from power of the white population comes to mind. But the narrator, Peter Jacobs, has lost the most ground and doesn't realise it; he has lost the place which could be defined as home. What he thinks he knows and what he actually knows are entirely separate and lead to disaster. His pat idea of the murder of Desiree as a kind of South African Othello is so wide of the mark, that it only emphasises his selfish but understated arrogance.
Peopled with fascinating characters in a land coping with violent change, Lost Ground is a fine novel with an absorbing plot and ideas which touch the heart, especially in its final chapters.
The narrator, a freelance journalist, who abandoned his home in Alfredville to avoid military service for the apartheid regime, and who has lived and worked in London for over twenty years, makes a return to his hometown. He has come to research the circumstances of the murder of his cousin, apparently by her black husband, who also happens to be chief of police and a former ANC activist. As he blunders about a town he once knew and interacts with new acquaintances and friends from the past, he uncovers quite a different story from what he had expected.
The book's title could refer to a number of lost grounds: the retreat from power of the white population comes to mind. But the narrator, Peter Jacobs, has lost the most ground and doesn't realise it; he has lost the place which could be defined as home. What he thinks he knows and what he actually knows are entirely separate and lead to disaster. His pat idea of the murder of Desiree as a kind of South African Othello is so wide of the mark, that it only emphasises his selfish but understated arrogance.
Peopled with fascinating characters in a land coping with violent change, Lost Ground is a fine novel with an absorbing plot and ideas which touch the heart, especially in its final chapters.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.3 out of 5 stars
3 reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lost ground
12 Feb 2013
By Kathy
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
Wonderful true to life Spouth African Novel. Most enjoyable light read > Good holiday matter . I have nothing more to say
5.0 out of 5 stars
Whodunnit?
6 Jan 2013
By Helen C. Evarts
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Read as a whodunnit or as a study of character, or even as a picture of the "new South Africa", Michiel Heyns succeeds in grabbing your interest in his gripping novel. It is beautifully written from the point of view of a former resident of a small town who returns to his former home from London where he lives with a successful Jamaican actor, to find many changes, some not to his liking.
Each character is carefully drawn, and the details of life are clearly shown in a novel where you feel you are living the action the author portrays so well. I loved it.
Each character is carefully drawn, and the details of life are clearly shown in a novel where you feel you are living the action the author portrays so well. I loved it.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Karoo magic
13 Nov 2012
By Jennivanmolly
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I loved his wonderful descriptions, especially of the Karoo countryside, small towns and unique people there-in. You felt as though you were living the life of our parents as well as present day.
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4.3 out of 5 stars
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