Like Monsters of the Deep

Residing in a moderately affluent Stellenbosch neighbourhood targeted by criminals and himself the victim of a burglary, Dr Ethan Smith, retired academic and reclusive widower, attributes the upsurge in violent crime to mounting reverse racism and the degeneration of civil society into cultural cannibalism. When a foreign national turns up on his doorstep asking for work, he surprises himself by hiring and harbouring him, an act of humanity he comes to regret. This book is a prose fiction about a terror-stricken citizen who has something to confess to the police, but fears that he will be misjudged by the local xenophobic community and condemned by State officials. To justify his actions, he keeps a journal in which he lays bare his inner life and makes a clean breast of what he has done. But is it a record of historical facts and his actual experiences? Or merely of his reveries and hallucinations? Cast in the form of an affidavit handwritten in the first person, the novel speaks through anecdotes and meditations to some of the major moral and political concerns in post-Mandela South Africa. Other novels by b. k. green: THE MONKEY ON THE MOUNTAIN (shortlisted for the EU Literary Award 2008), an initiation story, and DR VIRGIL'S DREAM, a political satire commemorating the Soweto Uprising of 1976.