When the novel was first published, MOST critics were full of praise! ‘Fairly waltzes the reader along…the mixture of the mundane and the fantastic is deceptively artless, the prose full of energy and humour and beneath the playfulness there is an undertow of pain…a thought-provoking and entertaining debut.’ - Hilary Mantel, Daily Telegraph. ‘Funny, bright and painfully sad…’ Helen Shaw, Irish Times. ‘Immensely appealing…Umfaan’s Heroes is a winner from cover to cover from an author with an abundance of talent.’ Evelyn Holzhausen Cape Times. ‘Excellent…is this Tom Sharpe territory? No, but there are many rich ironies reminiscent of Sharpe’s good, if bitter sweet scenes of farce…. a fine, realistic novel.’ Margaret Forster Sunday Times. Only the snob at Publisher’s Weekly was sniffy. So I wonder why that was the review Amazon chose to use? A richly funny and painful story Umfaan’s Heroes is a fantasy and a political novel in spite of itself, with a seasoning of Science Fiction with a unique insight into living under the insane madness of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Lovers of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Sharpe, Ursula Le Guin and Franz Kafka will enjoy this book. Aware of his incarnations in past lives, Tom Bloch, 18-year-old army conscript - South African, white, Jewish - in a prison cell, is condemned to death for terrorism. The novel relates Tom’s journey to his cell, how he was befriended by a witch-doctor claiming to be a harvester (of bodies!) from another planet, via his fist fight with his father, his friendship with an Afrikaner boy, experiments with drugs to this gloomy place with the hangman’s noose dangling outside. Just as well that Tom has always regarded life as an interlude between deaths for he soon becomes dangerously involved with the Mandela-like figure of Absolom. And madness, death and insane comedy is the only winner….
