 The strongest debut in years:
SLEEPER'S WAKE
Winner of the 2009
Plimpton Prize for Fiction
When forty-six year old John Wraith regains consciousness after the horrific car accident that claims the lives of his wife and daughter, he is adrift, bewildered and deeply traumatised.
He takes up the offer of time to recuperate in Nature’s Valley, a wild, unspoilt coastal settlement at the edge of dense forest and indigenous bush. It is winter and most of the holiday homes are boarded up.
It is here that his path crosses that of a damaged family in retreat from their own horrific trauma: Roelf, a devoutly religious man trying to make sense of what hashappened to them, and his two children, seventeen year old Jackie and her younger brother Simon.
John’s uneasy involvement with this trio and particularly with Jackie, for whom he feels a confusing mixture of protectiveness and sexual attraction, provides the novel with its driving narrative and, ultimately, its shocking denouement.
Written in lucid, often beautiful prose, Sleeper’s Wake is a haunting study of man at his most vulnerable.
• Winner of the 2009 Plimpton Prize, the first time this prize has been awarded to a non-American writer. (Every year, the Paris Review awards the Plimpton Prize for Fiction to the best new fiction writer who has appeared in the magazine.)
• Extracts published by the Paris Review - The most influential literary journal in the world.
 Alistair Morgan was born in Johannesburg in 1971. He has previously been published in the Paris Review and in the 2009 O.Henry Prize Stories. Sleeper’s Wake is Alistair Morgan’s first novel. He lives in Cape Town. |
