Short description
David Hirson is an author, actor and lecturer. David Philip, South Africa and Carcanet Press, UK published his first novel “House Next Door to Africa” in 1986. The book was translated into French (Editions Autrement) and Italian (Marietti).
Long description
Imagine you are in an aeroplane at daybreak, your eyes blurred with sleep. The pilot has just announced that the flight will be over in a few minutes. The city tilts towards you now. You catch a glimpse of street-lamps, cars silently torching the soft grey air, a few yellow windows in the massed darkness of buildings. As the plane veers towards the airport, you are filled with the sense of an entire city stirring from the intimacy of the night, about to blink at itself in the mirror, still indifferent to your presence though it will soon draw you down into the immediacy of its preoccupations.
Now imagine that this is not a city of the present but a city of the past, your past; a place you have not lived in for decades, and which you are returning to as if it were still all it had ever been before you left. Imagine that the lights you see are your own glittering, floating memories, rising into focus across the foggy gap of absence, reminding you that despite all the years spent in another place, your previous existence is still very much alive in your mind.
Review
'Extraordinary. This is unlike anything I have ever read... The form is as surprising as its subtle ability to tell the tales of our past' - Antjie Krog