Total recall

Pieter-Dirk Uys’s memoir, The Echo of a Noise, recalls his childhood and his family: his forbidding and musically driven father; his brilliant but depressed mother; his sister the child prodigy; and his second mother, Sannie Abader, who worked in the Uys household. The book also features his Afrikaner matriarch, “Paarlse ouma”, and his strudel-baking German ouma, his friendship with Sophia Loren, his invention of Evita Bezuidenhout, and the joys and sorrows of his remarkable life.

The Echo of a Noise: A Memoir of Then and Now (also available in Afrikaans as Weerklink van ’n Wanklank) is published by Tafelberg (R280) and will be in stores on October 22