Familiarity Is the Kingdom of the Lost

A fast-paced romp through apartheid-era South Africa that exemplifies the creative human capacity to overcome seemingly omnipotent enemies and overwhelming odds. The picaresque hero of this novel, Duggie, is a dispossessed black street kid turned con man. Duggies response to being confined to the lowest level of South Africas oppressive and humiliating racial hierarchy is to one-up its absurdity with his own glib logic and preposterous schemes. Duggies story, as one critic puts it, offers an encyclopedic catalogue of rip-offs, swindles, and hoaxes that regularly land him in jail and rely on his white targets refusal to admit a black man is capable of outsmarting them. Duggie exploits South Africas bureaucratic pass laws and leverages his artificial leg every chance he gets. As a worthless embarrassment to the authorities and a bad example to the convicts, Duggie even manages to get himself thrown out of jail. From Duggies Depression-era childhood in urban Johannesburg to World War II and the rise of the white supremacist apartheid regime to his final, bitter triumph, Boeties narrative celebrates humanitys relentless drive to survive at any cost. This new edition of Boeties out-of-print classic features a recently discovered photograph of the author, an introduction replete with previously unpublished research, numerous annotations, and is accompanied by Lionel Abrahams haunting poem, Soweto Funeral, composed after attending Boeties interment, all of which render the text accessible to a new generation of readers.