Publications

Local folklore had it that only people with troubled pasts ended up in his forlorn harbour but Captain Sylvester Nunes also brought a terrible future. Arriving at an unnamed South African port, Nunes, a customs official, is determined to uncover the dark, criminal secret he is certain lies at its heart. This consuming obsession drives him to enforce a repressive regime - and his untiring interrogations uncover a miscellany of bizarre and bewildering stories.

Also available in French from Editions du Seuil

With tremendous imaginative and political daring, South African novelist Mike Nicol offers a luminous parable of his country's past. Bawdy and terrifying, fantastical yet eerily familiar This Day And Age recounts the realisation of a prophecy told to a newly elected president on the eve of his inauguration. After years of harmony and plenty will come a time of plague and famine, and a strange man-child with a Bible chained to his wrist and an army of the disenfranchised in his thrall will gather strength in the most remote reaches of the land. As these events unfold, they offer a searing portrait of what happens when the preachings of a bloodthirsty messiah are legitimised by centuries of imperialist oppression - a struggle brought urgently to life in this extraordinary work of passion and power.

Also available in French from Editions du Seuil

This ferocious new novel by one of South Africa's visionary writers is a post-colonial reimagining of the Book of Revelation--an unholy epic that re-envisions the catastrophic violence of European "civilization" as a hooded rider who spreads slaughter across the African continent--a work that is as unnerving as it is intellectually provocative.

Also available in French from Editions du Seuil

An audacious departure for the internationally acclaimed South African novelist--a thriller with all the searing immediacy of today's headlines. Who was Christo Mercer, and why was he brutally stabbed to death in a remote Saharan town? For Robert Poley, an unhappy writer of political thrillers, the welcome distraction posed by this question has become an obsession. With the mysterious delivery of a laptop computer and a cryptic E-mail message, he finds himself slowly entwined in the vagaries that constituted Mercer's life and death. An illegal-arms trader haunted by his nightmares, his past, and his clandestine involvement with a ruthless rebel-- and with Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great --Mercer lived on the grand stage of history, yet remained obscured by shadows until his seemingly fated demise. Now, piece by piece, in a complex web of social, political, personal, and fictional disclosures, the intricacies of Mercer's troubled psyche begin to reveal a pattern as corrupt as South Africa's in the aftermath of apartheid--years of judicial inquiry, the Truth Commission, and continued social unrest. With alchemical bravura, Mike Nicol turns history into fiction and fiction into history, bringing to allegorical life the haunting story of a murder emblematic of South Africa's recent past.

Also available in French from Editions du Seuil

A novella of the life and times of journalist Henry Nxumalo - Mr Drum - commissioned by Heinemann and written for high school pupils. Originally published in 1997. Now out of print