Limited special signed edition

A collectable jewel of a book: Denis Hirson’s exquisite prose paired with drawings by William Kentridge. An evocative recollection of a seaside holiday, seen through a young boy’s eyes, with a glimpse of adult betrayal, longing and disappearance. Christmas in Isipingo takes place in South Africa in 1959. Dr Verwoerd, the ‘architect of apartheid,’ has recently come to power. The narrator is a young Jewish boy of nine or ten who usually spends Christmas in Johannesburg, but this year travels with his parents in their little car to visit friends in Isipingo, a seaside village on the east coast, near Durban. It is his first sight of the sea. What follows is a story told in the vivid, unfiltered wonder of childhood. It is summer, there is a lucky-bean tree, bright sea-anemones in the rockpools, shoals of sardines you can scoop out of a wave in a bucket. Beneath the sunlit surface, an adult drama the boy senses but does not yet understand unfolds – political discussion, a stolen glance between two people who should not be looking at each other, a man who vanishes without a trace, and an unanswered question. A dark streak runs through a story that is also filled with light. Told with the spare, luminous precision that is Denis Hirson’s signature, and illustrated with original drawings by William Kentridge, Christmas in Isipingo is a small book carrying weighty feeling – nostalgic, unsettling and devastating by turns.