Sleeper's Wake - Tapa blanda

'An exquisitely realised and remarkably assured piece of fiction which marks the arrival of a singular new talent' Sunday Herald 'Not in a very long time have I read something that gripped me so intensely - Quite a tour de force - I often felt like scribbling Bravo!A" in the margin' Andre Brink 'Alistair Morgan grips the reader from the very first line - Literary fiction with the pace of a thriller, this outstanding first novel marks the arrival of an exciting new writer' Irish Examiner 'A serious, harrowing read - Morgan evokes the intensity of the situation brilliantly, making Sleeper's Wake a sombre but gripping experience' Herald 'The spare, unstinting prose and bleak landscape recall Coetzee, as does the single-minded masculinity of the drama' Guardian 'This deeply affecting debut novel, garlanded with praise from Andre Brink, has a voice distinctively its own, each sore word, uttered from the depths of mourning, earning its keep' New Statesman

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 incident. 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 largely deserted - except for a disturbed young woman of seventeen 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.