In the Shadow of the Rock

The seagull wheeled and dived above the boy in the early orange glow of a Durban morning. Its mournful cry, like a lost soul in torment, seemed to set it apart from its kind. Hans heard and understood for he, too, felt different from his fellows - he already suspected that he was gay. The Shadow of the Rock is the story of a white German-speaking South African boy growing up in a conservative rural community, whose strong religious code outlawed homosexuality, within a country ruled by apartheid. Moving, poignant and in the end tragic, the novel explores Hans' attempts to find a solution - at best unsatisfactory, at worst disastrous - to his dilemma. His fight for survival - with the forces of Christian hypocrisy, medical ineptitude and social prejudice massed against him, set paradoxically in the idyllic South African countryside - makes for a powerful tour de force in a promising first novel.