Sawubona - paperback

He lost everything in the fire. It took a stolen pair of shoes, a fourteen-year-old boy, and one Zulu word to give it back.

Robert Harrison was a baker, a husband, a father. Ten years after the fire that killed his wife and destroyed his business, he is a white beggar in a Black city – a man Johannesburg walks past without seeing. Sober now, estranged from his daughter, he carries a guilt everyone agrees he deserves.

Sipho Dlamini is fourteen. He has lost his parents, his home and very nearly everything else. What he has is a quick mind, his father's instruction to aim high, and a pair of Nike trainers he stole for himself – the first shoes he has owned in months. When the shoes bring violence, Robert steps between the boy and a knife, and a wary arrangement between a broken man and an orphaned boy becomes something neither of them can name and neither can do without.

Across the city, Robert's daughter Julie – a lawyer who has spent ten years refusing to forgive him – opens the police file on the fire. She is trained to read evidence. The evidence says the case was never really closed.

Sawubona is the Zulu greeting. It means I see you.

Set on the streets, alleys and soup kitchens of Johannesburg, Sawubona is a novel about grief and guilt, fathers and daughters, and the families we assemble from what remains of the ones we lose. A debut work of contemporary literary fiction from a writer who spent twenty years in the city he writes about.

For readers of Rachel Joyce, Fredrik Backman and Damon Galgut.