Search results for ""author bryan rostron""

A cautionary tale about organized crime in modern South Africa, this thrilling mystery introduces unassuming archivist Macaulay Vogel, who is examining a recently discovered cache of old police archives. Sorting out the documents, Vogel is jolted when he comes upon a surveillance file about himself. It’s a terrible shock: he doesn’t recognize this person at all. Had he suffered a memory loss in his youth? Had someone stolen his identity? To find some answers, he seeks out old friends: a lover, former comrades, and even his nemesis, Boschard, an eerie former security policeman. At the same time Vogel is making his rounds, there are signs of growing racial anger over the excavation of a mysterious accumulation of bones in the center of Cape Town, which might be a secret human burial pit. Amidst the personal and civic confusion, Vogel begins to crack, despairing of his lapsed hopes and the lost love of a woman named Marda.

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For 250 years the author’s family spread across the globe, helping to expand the British Empire and paint the map red. This is a personal reckoning with that dubious legacy, echoing down to the present in South Africa. It begins with the ‘discovery’ of Tahiti in 1767 by an ancestor, from whose log book Rostron reveals that his sailors were exchanging the ship’s nails for sex with Tahitian maidens so that HMS Dolphin began, literally, to fall apart. After the Anglo-Boer war, having emigrated to South Africa, one grandfather became editor of the Sunday Times, voicing racist opinions, and later of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time a voice of the Randlords. Ironically, his other grandfather worked for the Communist Party and printed revolutionary pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Revolt. In a bizarre twist, Rostron’s father managed the 1936 South African boxing team at the Berlin Olympics, where from under his nose their star boxer was recruited by the Nazis. Uncovering family secrets and mistaken myths, Rostron offers a unique insight into modern-day South Africa’s colonial past.

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