Life sentence

a biography of Herman Charles Bosman

Plot

This is the absorbing (and often shocking) story of the life of the most famous and best loved writer in South Africa of the first half of the twentieth century. Bosman was born in the Cape in 1905, schooled in Johannesburg and trained as a teacher, then sent to a backveld school - the people he met there and the observations he made were the source for the stories in his bestselling Mafeking Road. After a sensational trial, found guilty of murdering his step-brother in cold blood, he served his term in Pretoria Central Prison - the source of his classic Cold Stone Jug. During his years of exile in Paris and London and when he returned to South Africa to make a popular career as a sly commentator, he produced A cask of Jerepigo. Before his untimely death in 1951, he became the country's best loved humorist. In this biography Bosman's extraordinary career is reconstructed from documents and his papers, to present the most revealing and explicit portrait of South Africa's most controversial author. Gray's investigation has thrown new light on many aspects of Bosman's life - some of his outrageous actions will astound his many faithful readers. Bosman himself ) with which Gray at times paints this fuller-than-ever-before portrait of his subject.