James Whyle’s We Two From Heaven is a haunting memoir that unravels memory like music – out now from Jonathan Ball Publishers.

We Two From Heaven weaves war letters, apartheid trauma, and the makings of a writer into a raw, lyrical fugue on identity, madness and time. Formally bold and beautifully brutal.

‘With insistence, humour and a wry, haunted nostalgia, James Whyle excavates a palimpsest of texts and voices to approach the questions existentially familiar to white South Africans: Who are we, how did we get here, and what does it mean? An invaluable contribution to the self-orienting literature of our country.’ – Darrel Bristow-Bovey 

‘A boldly imagined and beautifully written memoir. Whyle’s prose is finely tuned, unflinching in its approach to painful subjects, but also laced with wry humour and the sheer delight of being alive.’ – Ivan Vladislavic

About the book

We Two From Heaven is a singular memoir, a four-part fugue on the tricks and traps of memory, a shuffling of the cards of time. Episodes from the early life of writer James Whyle are interwoven with the letters of his father from the Western Front during the First World War. Their formative experiences – war, conscription, injury, desertion – flash by, juxtaposed, as if in counterpoint.

How do we know who we are? Upending the reader’s expectations of a memoir, Whyle then explores the violence and madness of apartheid society as the narrator passes through boarding school and university and takes his first steps to become a writer. Raw and rhythmic, lyrical and caustic, this is an unsparing, formally inventive dissection of human vanities and illusions.

At the end of history, on the shores of a blue bay, the voices of the past can be heard as we await the arrival of the barbarians – or the baboons, whoever comes first.

About the author

James Whyle grew up in the Amatole Mountains in South Africa. Conscripted into the apartheid army, he was discharged on the grounds of insanity. He did everything in his power to assist the authorities in arriving at this diagnosis. The resulting play, National Madness, won an Amstel Playwright of the Year merit award in 1982. His story ‘The Story’ was chosen by JM Coetzee as winner of the 2011 Pen/Studzinski competition. The Book of War, a novel, won the M-Net Lit Prize for best debut in 2012.

Categories Non-fiction South Africa

Tags James Whyle Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases We Two From Heaven