A page-turning and haunting novel about man at his most naked and vulnerable.
Forty-six-year-old John Wraith regains consciousness after a car accident to learn that his wife and five-year-old daughter died in the same accident. What is all the more traumatic for him is that he was driving the car. At the urging of his sister, John decides to recuperate in her holiday chalet in Nature's Valley, on the South African coast. It is winter and Nature's Valley is mostly deserted - except for a disturbed young woman of twenty-one called Jackie, her equally strange brother and her father, who is a born again Christian. John's uneasy yet intense involvement with this trio, particularly with Jackie, to whom he is sexually attracted, provides the novel with its driving narrative and extraordinary, shocking denouement. Written in lucid, often beautiful prose, Sleeper's Wake is a haunting study of man at his most naked and vulnerable.
About Alistair Morgan
Alistair Morgan was born in Johannesburg in 1971. Two of his short stories have been published in the Paris Review, one of which was nominated for a National Magazine Award and is also included in the O.Henry Prize Stories 2009. Sleeper's Wake is Alistair Morgan's first novel. He lives in Cape Town.