The Smell of Apples

Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles TimesWinner of the M-Net AwardWinner of The Eugene Marais AwardWinner of the CNA Literary AwardWinner of the Betty Trask AwardA Booker Prize NomineeSet in the bitter twilight of apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, The Smell of Apples is a haunting story narrated by eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus, who records the social turmoil and racial oppression that are destroying his own land. Using his family as a microcosm of the corroding society at large, Marnus tells a troubling tale of a childhood corrupted, of unexpected sexual defilements, and of an innocence gone astray.