White Lightning

'Beneath a mountain in South Africa, a man is walking. He comes across an old farmhouse.'

This is the beginning of an extraordinary novel. It is told over the space of a few months, and in these few months one man's whole life - his failures, his successes, his longing for peace and fulfilment, his loves and his tragedies - are recounted.

The narrator, a former soft porn film director, turned motor cycle courier, has been summoned to South Africa, his birthplace, because his mother is dying, the start of an odyssey backwards into his memories. These memories include his film 'Suzi Crispin, Night Nurse', and - the darkest moment - the death of his son, which has haunted him for nearly twenty years.

He inherits a small amount of money and buys the rundown farm, where he dreams of creating an Arcadia. On the farm is a captive baboon, Piet, who becomes startlingly involved in his new life. He also has a love affair with a local woman, and becomes hauntingly embroiled with an African family of squatters.

All the while the narrator contemplates his own life back in England, in a sharp commentary on the meaning of Englishness.

This is a novel about the nature of the human enterprise. It is surprising, tender, funny, tragic and utterly original, written by one of our most acclaimed novelists.