Each Mortal Thing

When Natasha, a novice writer from South Africa, is nominated for a major British literary prize, Terence, a young university lecturer, undertakes to introduce her to the sights of London. However, London and its literary cliques are a far cry from Natasha’s Karoo hometown: through no fault of her own, she is disqualified, and their affair ends in tragedy. Terence, whose best friend accuses him of suffering from a Good Samaritan complex, now takes an interest in a rough sleeper and his dog that he meets outside a tube station. This turns out to be a complex undertaking. As the ghosts of his past relationships are visited upon him, Terence is forced to reconsider the meaning of human connections – how our lives touch, and are touched by, others. Michiel Heyns’s Each Mortal Thing shows us the metropolis through fresh eyes, calculates the cost of acts of kindness, and speaks to the grace that friendship can bestow on us.

Michiel Heyns’s critically acclaimed novels include The Children’s Day, The Reluctant Passenger and The Typewriter’s Tale. He has thrice been awarded the Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Fiction, and his novel Lost Ground won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. His novels have been translated into Afrikaans, Dutch, Spanish and French, The Typewriter’s Tale winning the Prix de l’Union Interalliée. He grew up all over South Africa – Thaba Nchu, Kimberley, Grahamstown and Cape Town – and was educated at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cambridge. For much of his adult life he was a professor of English at the University of Stellenbosch. Each Mortal Thing is his tenth novel

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