The Children's Day

The tender chronicle of a boy's coming of age in South Africa during the apartheid years of the sixties, The Children's Day captures the essence of growing up in a world fraught with the 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 eyes of Simon, who struggles to make sense of the adults around him—torn between scorn for his surroundings and a desire to belong. This debut novel is peopled with poignant, vulnerable, and sometimes eccentric characters, and it is through their lives that Simon comes to understand the complexities of love.

Michiel Heyns grew up all over South Africa ? Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, Grahamstown, Cape Town - and was educated at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. For much of his adult life he was an academic, lecturing in English at the University of Stellenbosch, but after publication of his first novel, The Children?s Day, he took to writing full-time, publishing The Reluctant Passenger in 2003 and The Typewriter?s Tale in 2005. His latest novel, Bodies Politic, was recently published by Jonathan Ball. In 2006 he translated two works by Marlene van Niekerk, Agaat and Memorandum. Agaat was awarded the Sunday Times Fiction Prize for 2006; published as The Way of the Women in the UK in November 2007, it was short-listed for the Independent Foerign Fiction Prize. He has recently translated Equatoria by Tom Dreyer, to be published by Aflame Books (UK) in 2008. He reviews regularly for the Sunday Independent, for which he was awarded the English Academy's Pringle Prize for Reviewing for 2006.

A.L. Kennedy is one of the most distinguished and acclaimed writers of her generation. She is the author of four collections of stories, most recently Indelible Acts, and four novels, including Paradise and Day, winner of the 2008 Costa Book Prize. She is the winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award and was chosen as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993 and again in 2003. Her work of non-fiction, On Bullfighting, is already regarded as a modern classic. She has been commissioned to write a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company and has embarked on a successful career in stand-up comedy.