Cephus Twala is dying. During his final moments he foresees the arrival of a descendant of his, a man not yet born, January Twala.
Helen Botes, one-time apartheid apparatchik, cannot reach her son. During her anxious marshalling of a home bent on disrepair, she’s attacked by an intruder who wants only to suck on her finger.
And Steven Moyo, environmental refugee and soft-hearted Red Ant, has resolved to seek out the strange squatter who claims to have walked from a fading future to save a neglected past.
Out of the Dead Lands is a novel about remembering and forgetting. It’s a ghost story set in a Johannesburg out of kilter with itself. Those from the future and the past wander through the present, disconnected from their places in time, or forced (it seems) into asylum by a neglect that threatens their likelihood of ever properly existing.
Out of the Dead Lands | Conrad Kemp
Conrad Kemp is a writer and actor originally from Johannesburg, South Africa. He’s got a law and English literature degree from Stellenbosch, an acting diploma from the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland, and an MA in Creative Writing from Cape Town. He’s published a poem, a short story and some flash fiction in the UK and South Africa, written very occasionally for newspapers and academic journals, and more often for film and television, including the documentaries Chasing the Sun (2020) and the Emmy-nominated Two Sides (2023). He’s also written for theatre in Ireland, South Africa and Norway.
He’s acted on the West End, London, and Broadway, New York, as well as at the world-renowned Market Theatre in Johannesburg. In film, he’s performed across from Forest Whitaker, Orlando Bloom, Toby Jones, Sienna Miller, Imelda Staunton, Viola Davis, and Sam Rockwell.
He lives with his wife, daughter, and mom in Plettenberg Bay.
Out of the Dead Lands is his first book.
4.5 stars
As a dyed in the wool genre fiction reader, I went into OUT OF THE DEAD LANDS forewarned that it would be a literary step beyond my usual. I wasn't surprised, then, when I initially found this a difficult read. Kemp's writing has a poetic turn to it. The moments we're presented with don't immediately fit together into a linear narrative. Despite the hazy nature of the opening, I was intrigued. More than intrigued, it engrossed me. As the novel progressed, story hooks presented themselves, and OUT OF THE DEAD LANDS resolved into a desperate race against a calamitous future.
While the blurb describes this as a 'ghost story set in a Johannesburg out of kilter with itself' don't take that to mean there are literal ghosts. OUT OF THE DEAD LANDS is a book about time as something more than a one-way dimension. Flickering shades of branching timelines overlap. It is also a book steeped in South Africa. There are concepts, jargon, and historical references that are touched on without further explanation, trusting the reader to familiarize themselves with the history and consequences of apartheid to fill in any context they may be lacking. Personally, I appreciated that. I love a book that doesn't compromise to make itself accessible to a foreign audience. OUT OF THE DEAD LANDS demands that readers meet it where it is at. And where it is at, is smack bang in Johannesburg's tumultuous urban heart.
There are without a doubt aspects of this I didn't comprehend. That's 100% a me issue, not the book. I'm so ready for more people to read this so we can talk about it!
I received OUT OF THE DEAD LANDS for review from Mirari Press as part of their Luminary Programme.