Listen to the new episode of Pagecast! James Whyle discusses his highly original new memoir We Two From Heaven
More about the book!

This week on Pagecast, the podcast from Jonathan Ball Publishers, Jeremy Boraine sits down with acclaimed author James Whyle to discuss his latest literary work, We Two From Heaven.

Pagecast offers you insider interviews with recently published authors, looking into the process of writing, exploring the narratives within and providing you with the story behind the story.

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.