The smell of apples

by Mark Behr

The smell of apples is a time bomb of a novel. Set in the bitter twilight of apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, it is a haunting story narrated by an eleven-year-old child, Marnus Erasmus, who simply and devastatingly records the social turmoil and racial oppression that are destroying his own land. Using his family as a microcosm of the corroding society at large, Marnus tells a troubling tale - of a childhood corrupted, of unexpected sexual defilements, and of an innocence gone awry.