Book Review: Sleeper's Wake

New Statesman

Sleeper's Wake, Alistair Morgan Cranta Books, 208pp, £10.99

It is easier to cancel a life than a gym membership. This is one of many cruel lessons learned by the 46 -year- old writer John Wraith, who wakes in hospital to be given the news that his wife and daughter have died in a car accident. Racked with pain, he is at first numbed, but his emotional hurt later rushes out in moments of rage and remorse - he was driving the car. Even though he survives, his life is "atrophied". Recovering at his sister's chalet in Nature's Valley, a remote coastal region of South Africa, he meets a family traumatised by crime. Morgan examines their damaged psyches without flinching.

Nature is beautifully evoked here: Wraith's grief surrounds him "like a coral reef", and the wintry season is as harsh as anything human life has to offer - or take away. This deeply affecting debut novel, garlanded with praise from André Brink, has a voice distinctively its own, each sore word, uttered from the depths of mourning, earning its keep.

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