The Smell of Apples

Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times

Winner of the M-Net Award

Winner of The Eugene Marais Award

Winner of the CNA Literary Award

Winner of the Betty Trask Award

A Booker Prize Nominee

Set 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.