DEEPER THAN COLOUR

Disturbing but compulsively readable book full of surprise twists and turns

Winner of the European Union Literary Award 2010 Short-listed for The Sunday Times Literary Award, and the University of Johannesburg Literary Prize 2011 Angus Smith is suffering from Post Taumatic Stress Disorder after his time serving in the Border War in Angola. He is pissed off with marriage, work and life. His marriage to Di has reached what he calls Phase IV – boredom – having gone through the first three phases – bed, more bed, less bed. He doubts they will ever reach the last phase – tears – as neither thinks the effort worthwhile. Then Angus decides to film his life. Exploring the gulf between how we perceive ourselves versus how others view us, this narrative follows his route from a terminally disaffected husband to a perversely inspired engineer of his own fate, raising unsettling questions about socially fractured societies with damaged people, like so many young males who survive war. Troubled people roam the streets of Johannesburg, the murder capital of the world and it is hard, says Angus, for an abnormal person like him to have a normal life in this abnormal city. James Clelland grew up in Scotland but has lived in South Africa for thirty years. He has had short stories broadcast on radio, published in literary magazines and UK Arts Council Anthologies. He has been a fiction reviewer for the Rand Daily Mail. James has appeared on a two-person panel with Ian Rankin in Cape Town in autumn 2013. He is due to deliver his second novel, THOSE STREETS, which features a young man who has seemingly murdered his mother in a bleak area of 1980s north-east England.