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HORTLY after my first book was published in 2013, I was on the redeye from Cape Town to Johannesburg when the pilot pointed out that we were flying over Kimberley. It was winter and the farmlands beneath us were a uniform shade of brown. This sad scene invoked the character of Hennie — a young man, son of a drunken and destitute Free State farmer, struggling to hold the derelict family farm together. I wrote down what I thought would be the opening lines of my next book.

The kind people who had published my first novel were gentle but firm in their rejection of my first attempt at his story. So I began to wonder what to do with Hennie when I was swept up by a different idea, one that resulted in a strange little novel called Wasted, which I wrote in a few obsessive months, even though the problem of Hennie was far from solved.

In the early iterations of its second life, the story of Hennie consisted of fragments rather than a coherent narrative. I set it in the early ’80s, a period of such turmoil in South Africa that it’s surprising it’s been more or less forgotten by contemporary South African fiction. Hennie’s father, Hendrik, and the character of Antoinette’s father, Oliver, came to represent the oppressively patriarchal Nationalist government, and allowed me to tell a story that I felt was authentic to the South Africa of the time, without having to address the sociopolitical situation directly, something that, to my mind, had been well travelled — and far better expressed — by writing during the dying years of apartheid. The stories of Hennie and poor little rich girl Antoinette came to mirror, in their own ways, the kind of naïve and often dangerous ignorance and isolation of South Africans.

The challenge I set myself was to find a voice and a style of writing that would set The Safest Place You Know apart from Wasted, which itself was so different to my first book in its narrative, characters, and its clipped and staccato prose. Safest Place allowed me to explore and develop a more lyrical voice that, I hoped, would lend itself naturally to the gentle nugget at the core of the novel — that each of us carries within us the means of forgiving and healing ourselves, even though we might be totally oblivious to its presence. — Mark Winkler