All the Saints

Move over, John ‘Spud’ Milton! We’re in the Eastern Cape now, where the gale force winds have nothing on the chanting gees of the boys at the prestigious local school. Isaac ‘Izzy’ Kingston, a recent matriculant and newly minted varsity dropout, has several straw hats’ worth of hilarious and harrowing school memories to share with a sympathetic audience. Isaac’s nostalgic first-person confessional, peppered with tongue-in-cheek observations, takes readers from the testosterone-fuelled excitement and high drama of the rugby field on Reunion Weekend to near-death encounters on overnight excursions in Cradock. With Isaac’s overachieving dreams imploding, interhouse plays gone awry, and his queerness firmly parked in the closet, All the Saints is the tragicomic coming of age tale for our time.

Wesley Roodt is a Chevening scholar with an MA in Film, Television and the Moving Image from the University of Westminster. The son of two former SABC news correspondents, he is a scriptwriter and director whose short film, Bear, about national rugby captain and former Gqeberha resident Siya Kolisi, won AFDA’s annual online festival and was selected for screening at the Cannes and Sundance film festivals. He works at The Media Workshop as an educator and producer. All the Saints is his debut novel.