The children's day - Michiel Heyns

The Children's Day is a literary chronicle – at times shocking, funny, and tender – of a boy’s coming of age in the Free State village of Verkeerdespruit, during the apartheid years of the sixties. Through a series of finely drawn and illuminating situations, the novel captures the essence of what it was like to grow up in a world fraught with strange and sometimes violent contradictions of class, race, gender, and language. The widening world of adolescence, in all its allure and confusion, is explored through the acute but puzzled eyes of Simon, who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him – torn between scorn for his surroundings and a desire to belong.

The novel is peopled with poignant, vulnerable and sometimes eccentric characters, through whose lives Simon comes to understand something of the complexity of what love can mean: Mr. de Wet whose eyes look 20 degrees to the right, Betty the Exchange without a chin, Klasie the postmaster who finds and loses love on the Boer War battlefields, Miss Rheeder with her red shoes and Trevor with his blonde fringe and pink shirt. And then there is Fanie, the poorest boy in the school – epileptic, taciturn, infuriating and yet strangely charismatic…