Lauren Beukes Interviewing Alistair Mackay for The Child Book Launch

After suffering a mental breakdown and losing his job at a New York advertising agency, a young man returns to Cape Town with his husband, Adrian. It’s 2018 and Cape Town is about to run out of water. This isn’t the homecoming they dreamed of, but the couple is determined to hold on to hope.

They are going to start a family by adopting a child. Someone to love, as the world around them falls apart. Maybe even a chance to atone for the sins of this country. But as the adoption gets underway, the narrator is forced to confront the childhood spectres he has spent a lifetime avoiding. While his marriage and sense of self begin to unravel, his life becomes increasingly enmeshed with that of their bubbly and outspoken domestic worker, Sibs, and her quiet young daughter, Buhle. And the more he tries to fix things, the worse they get.

Lies, violence and trauma endanger their hopes of a new beginning. And in the chaos of it all, he has to find his way back to Adrian, and to himself.

“Outrageously beautiful” – News24

“A testament to the power of story-telling” – Sunday Times

“An important, if not essential, voice of contemporary South Africa” – C.A. Davids
“Fresh, unflinching and propulsive” – S.J. Naudé

Alistair Mackay is the author of The Child. His debut novel, It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way was long-listed for the British Science Fiction Association Awards, The Sunday Times Literary Awards, and was chosen by Brittle Paper as a Notable African Book of 2022. His writing explores queerness, marginalisation, social justice and climate change. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and an MA in Politics from Edinburgh University. He lives in Cape Town.

Lauren Beukes is the award-winning South African author of six novels, a short story collection and NYT-best-selling graphic novels, including Zoo City which won the Arthur C Clarke Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle, The Shining Girls, now a major AppleTV show with Elisabeth Moss, and, most recently, the reality-bending mother-daughter-dreamworm novel, Bridge. Her work has been translated into 25 languages and she’s also worked in kids animation, TV scriptwriting and directed an award-winning documentary.