Out of the Dead Lands

Cephus Twala is dying. During his final moments he foresees the arrival of a descendant of his, a man not yet born, January Twala.

Helen Botes, one-time apartheid apparatchik, cannot reach her son. During her anxious marshalling of a home bent on disrepair, she’s attacked by an intruder who wants only to suck on her finger.

And Steven Moyo, environmental refugee and soft-hearted Red Ant, has resolved to seek out the strange squatter who claims to have walked from a fading future to save a neglected past.

Out of the Dead Lands is a novel about remembering and forgetting. It’s a ghost story set in a Johannesburg out of kilter with itself. Those from the future and the past wander through the present, disconnected from their places in time, or forced (it seems) into asylum by a neglect that threatens their likelihood of ever properly existing.