The Unseen Genius

By the picturesque Cape seaside town of Hermanus, South Africa, the apartheid police have located a bloodstained rock on a coastal path and hand-written pages blowing along the shoreline. The author of these pages, Joseph Salem, a young biologist, has apparently fallen over the cliff-face into the sea. His girlfriend, Lexa Du Plessis, alerted the police to this accident. But when the police suspect these pages to be political writing, a mystery unfolds as she races for clues to his strange disappearance as the police begin to arrest Joseph’s friends.

At the heart of this mystery, set over a weekend in the politically turbulent mid-1980s in South Africa, is the story of a family whose son is deciding his future as his father struggles with memories which betray his own past. It is a novel which serves as a powerful metaphor for apartheid and for generations who are waiting to fulfil their dreams.