Overview

For readers of literary fiction about identity, political violence, and the long shadow of childhood trauma... I Am Harry is a psychological novel set against the brutal machinery of apartheid-era South Africa. In 1963, a white family on holiday at Bashee River is slaughtered by Poqo militants. Their young son survives, hidden by a Xhosa girl who covers his body with her own through the night. Rescued and adopted by an English couple, he grows up as Richard-his memory of the massacre erased, his identity fractured. Fourteen years later, cryptic letters arrive at his university flat, demanding that ""Harry"" return to East London to pay for his parents' betrayal. As Richard discovers a hidden journal in his window-seat cupboard-writing that is his, yet not his-another self begins to surface. Harry, the traumatized child, still lives within him. The novel unfolds through nested narratives, letters, and a pocketbook dialogue between the protagonist's two identities. Moving between a provincial English university and the townships, prisons, and rivers of South Africa's Eastern Cape, the rivers an indelible metaphor for history's current, I Am Harry explores dissociative trauma, the limits of white liberal consciousness, and the Xhosa concept of ubuntu-""a person is a person through other people."" There are echoes of J.M. Coetzee and André Brink, as Simon Cole crafts a haunting meditation on memory, belonging, and the impossibility of starting over.

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9781067669416

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