User:Alistairmorgan

Alistair Morgan is a South African novelist and short story writer. His short stories have been published in the Paris Review and the O.Henry Prize Stories 2009. He is the first non-American to be awarded the Plimpton Prize for Fiction and has been shortlisted for the 2009 Caine Prize for African writing. His debut novel, Sleeper's Wake, is forthcoming from Penguin (South Africa) and Granta (United Kingdom) in August 2009.

About Sleeper's Wake

Review 'Not in a very long time have I read something that gripped me so intensely' - Andre Brink --Review

Review 'Beautifully told'- Peter Matthiesson, author of The Snow Leopard

Review 'The story blazes in your mind long after you've turned the last page' - Anne Landsman, author of The Rowing Lesson

Synopsis

Forty-six-year-old John Wraith regains consciousness after a car accident to learn that his wife and five-year-old daughter died in the same accident. What is all the more traumatic for him is that he was driving the car. At the urging of his sister, John decides to recuperate in her holiday chalet in Nature's Valley, on the South African coast. It is winter and Nature's Valley is mostly deserted - except for a disturbed young woman of twenty one called Jackie, her equally strange brother and her father, who is a born again Christian. John's uneasy yet intense involvement with this trio, particularly with Jackie, to whom he is sexually attracted, provides the novel with its driving narrative and extraordinary, shocking denouement. Written in lucid, often beautiful prose, "Sleeper's Wake" is a haunting study of man at his most naked and vulnerable.