‘BODIES POLITIC is a wonderfully elegant novel.’ Three women look back in old age at a past they shared, not always harmoniously: Emmeline Pankhurst, the formidable suffragette; her daughter Sylvia; and Helen, who was loved by Harry, the neglected son of Emmeline and beloved brother to Sylvia. Through the narrative of each woman flits the figure of Christabel, Mrs Pankhurst’s favourite daughter: selfish, vain but irresistible. The three accounts, sometimes contradictory, sometimes confirmatory, reconstruct piece by piece the events surrounding Harry’s death and the human entanglements behind, indeed at times driving, the public acts of the time.

Around these extraordinary women and their men Michiel Heyns has woven a novel of complex motivations disrupting the apparent unity of the Women’s Movement: Sylvia’s resentment of her mother’s treatment of Harry, Emmeline’s bitterness at Sylvia’s public opposition to her and her horror at Sylvia’s illegitimate child, Helen’s ambivalent feelings at having been summoned by Sylvia to Harry’s deathbed with an extraordinary request: ‘Tell him you love him; he has only three weeks to live.’

Against the background of massive public events – the struggle for the vote for women, the First World War – Bodies Politic examines, in fictionalised form, the private lives of the participants in these events, and the need for causes to be manifested in specific human bodies, in all their strength and weakness. Moving, dramatic and at times grimly humorous, Bodies Politic is an entirely original account of great love and bitter resentment, political victory and personal defeat; but ultimately of the indomitable spirit that escapes the shackles of the body.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michiel Heyns went to school in Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, and Grahamstown, and studied at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. Following the huge success of his remarkable debut novel, The Children's Day, he now writes full time. He has published three novels, The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger and The Typewriter’s Tale, all published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Price R160
ISBN: 978-1-86842-298-2
April 2008
TPB
Category: Fiction

The Children’s Day is a literary chronicle – at times shocking, funny, and tender – of a boy’s coming of age in the Free State village of Verkeerdespruit, during the apartheid years of the sixties. Through a series of finely drawn and illuminating situations, the novel captures the essence of what it was like to grow up in a world fraught with strange and sometimes violent contradictions of class, race, gender, and language. The widening world of adolescence, in all its allure and confusion, is explored through the acute but puzzled eyes of Simon, who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him – torn between scorn for his surroundings and a desire to belong.

The novel is peopled with poignant, vulnerable and sometimes eccentric characters, through whose lives Simon comes to understand something of the complexity of what love can mean: Mr de Wet whose eyes look 20 degrees to the right, Betty the Exchange without a chin, Klasie the postmaster who finds and loses love on the Boer War battlefields, Miss Rheeder with her red shoes and Trevor with his blonde fringe and pink shirt. And then there is Fanie, the poorest boy in the school – epileptic, taciturn, infuriating and yet strangely charismatic…

Michiel Heyns went to school in Thaba Nchu, Kimberly, and Grahamstown, and studied at the Universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. He now lectures in English at the University of Stellenbosch. This is his first novel.

The Children’s Day is a literary chronicle – at times shocking, funny, and tender – of a boy’s coming of age in the Free State village of Verkeerdespruit, during the apartheid years of the sixties. Through a series of finely drawn and illuminating situations, the novel captures the essence of what it was like to grow up in a world fraught with strange and sometimes violent contradictions of class, race, gender, and language. The widening world of adolescence, in all its allure and confusion, is explored through the acute but puzzled eyes of Simon, who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him – torn between scorn for his surroundings and a desire to belong.

The novel is peopled with poignant, vulnerable and sometimes eccentric characters, through whose lives Simon comes to understand something of the complexity of what love can mean: Mr de Wet whose eyes look 20 degrees to the right, Betty the Exchange without a chin, Klasie the postmaster who finds and loses love on the Boer War battlefields, Miss Rheeder with her red shoes and Trevor with his blonde fringe and pink shirt. And then there is Fanie, the poorest boy in the school – epileptic, taciturn, infuriating and yet strangely charismatic . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michiel Heyns went to school in Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, and Grahamstown, and studied at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. Following the huge success of his remarkable debut novel, The Children's Day, he now writes full time. He has published three novels, The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger and The Typewriter’s Tale, all published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.

Softcover B-format R115
ISBN: 978-1-86842-299-9
March 2008
Category: Fiction
The Children’s Day - Michiel Heyns

Combining fact with fiction, Heyns recreates the society around the celebrated author Henry James, as seen through the cool gaze of his typist, Frieda Wroth.

Admiring of the great author, she nevertheless feels marginalised and under-valued, a mere typewriter. But when the dashing Morton Fullerton comes to visit, she finds herself at the centre of an intrigue every bit as engrossing as the novels she types every day, bringing her into conflict with the flamboyant Edith Wharton, and compromising her loyalty to her employer.

Frieda tries to obey James' dictum: 'Live all you can; it's a mistake not to.' But living, she finds, exacts a price: it takes place at the expense of other lives.

Jonathan Ball Publishers,
ISBN: 1868422291,
Trade Paperback,
240 pages,
R139.95