FiveBooks

Malan is a really extraordinary writer, and he was writing, in late-apartheid South Africa, about killings by blacks of whites and by whites of blacks. A bit like police reporting, but also a memoir. It’s a hybrid form, grappling with what the violence tells us about the politics and what the culture tells you about the violence. It goes deep, deep, deep into individual lives, which I increasingly have come to believe is the only way that we can understand these large, political shapes, particularly in stories that are foreign to us.