Here is Bosman’s cool analysis of maleness and sadism down Voortrekker Street in the South African dorps of old, in the days of General Smuts’ collapsing Union. Here is the seamy underside of boarding-house and school common room, exposed with masterly psychological sharpness, the erotic drives laid bare as they had never been so explicitly before. Bosman’s tale of a triangular passion leading to brutal murder reads just as intriguingly today as when its hot Chapter Six, thought to be pornographic, shocked its first readers.
This text of Jacaranda in the night, complete and unabridged, is edited from the original printing, with an introduction placing it within the post-war Johannesburg literary school of hard realism which it served to shape.