Before I Forget

From a world-class writer – a remarkable new novel about love in all its forms.

Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer; an old writer, a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year’s Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress, who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled.

Having believed that his remaining function should be to comfort his mother, more than a century old now, he finds himself captivated by Rachel and drawn into a close friendship with her photographer husband George, a friendship that inevitably threatens this precarious triangular relationship.

Woven through this is the story of his life and of a lifetime of loving many women including brief affairs, extended affairs, a marriage; intensely carnal encounters and tender attachments. From Daphne, the troubled dancer, to Bonnie, his authoritarian father’s secretary, and Grethe, who arranges for her many lovers to meet at a party in her absence, these women define and inform his life.

As it becomes clear that this book is the final writing act of Chris’s creative life, so we understand that the recollection of these many loves is an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. Erotic, searingly honest, elegiac and profoundly moving, Before I Forget is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love.

André Brink has won South Africa’s most important literary prize, the CAN Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. André Brink is Professor of English at the University of Cape Town.