Dalila

Soon to be a major film, written and directed by Christopher Hampton – Oscar-winning writer of Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement – Dalila is a remarkably moving fictional story of one woman's heartbreaking journey through the UK asylum system and very real detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood

An extraordinary journey, following 21-year-old Dalila through a novel that is both hard to put down and hard to continue… Beautifully observed…what is being built transcends plot, emerging as a study of the nature of despair and memory.

Donald grafts Dalila’s experiences together with the precise pace of a thriller, and it is as compelling as it is tough, sidestepping piety in favour of clear-eyed infectious anger.

Just as history is written by the victors, the foreign is typically viewed from the perspective of the powerful, an imbalance to which Jason Donald's earnest, accomplished new novel Dalila is a corrective.

Writing fiction that deals with social issues can be a tightrope walk… Jason Donald has walked that tightrope superbly.

Jason Donald’s writing is vivid and immediate, told in the present tense, with a constant sense of danger and often heart-rending to read. His heroine is one person who represents countless people; her story is no less powerful because it happens every day. Uncomfortable, but intensely truthful.

A vivid, vital novel, it's shot through with humour and tenderness.

Dalila is written with such immense empathy.

Donald is a powerful literary writer, an author with real empathy and an unflinching eye.

An achingly brutal depiction of how society treats asylum seekers – a tale that is especially relevant in today’s world.

Dalila does for the Home Office what I, Daniel Blake did for the Department of Work and Pensions... stands to shine a light on the side of the migration story that never makes the news.

It had me laughing one moment then in tears the next… A well-told story of what life throws at us and how we adapted to tell our story, our ubuntu.

Dalila is one of the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in a while. Succinct yet beautifully descriptive, it would be impossible for any reader to come away from it without a renewed or newfound sympathy for genuine asylum seekers. This is an absorbing, heartbreaking novel.

Utterly compelling. Dalila, a multi-layered story of more than one displaced life, is as up-close, resonant and right-now as it gets.

Dalila is a riveting examination of one of today's most urgent issues. Telling the story of a young and desperate Kenyan asylum-seeker, Jason Donald writes with insight (and considerable inside knowledge) about the particular purgatory through which she and so many like her have to pass. All the more powerful for not being a mere polemic, Dalila is grippingly authentic, transparently truthful and exceptionally moving.

A compelling novel of a young woman’s struggle to find safety in a hostile world, Dalila examines some of the most important issues of our age. Powerful, compassionate and deeply human.

The character of Dalila, so courageous and dignified, so unassuming and yet so resilient, lives with the reader long after the book has been put down.

Jason Donald was born in Scotland and grew up in South Africa. He studied English Literature and Philosophy at St Andrews University and, in 2005, graduated from Glasgow University’s Creative Writing Masters Degree programme with distinction. His first novel, Choke Chain, was published by Cape in 2009.

'As compelling as it is tough, sidestepping piety in favour of clear-eyed infectious anger' Sunday Times 
 
Irene Dalila Mwathi comes from Kenya with a brutally violent personal history. Once she wanted to be a journalist, now all she wants is to be safe. When she finally arrives, bewildered, in London, she is attacked by the very people paid to protect her, and she has no choice but to step out on her own into this strange new world. Through a dizzying array of interviews, lawyer’s meetings, regulations and detention centres, she realises that what she faces may be no less dangerous than the violence she has fled. 
 
Written with grace, humour and compassion, this timely and thought-provoking novel tackles its uncomfortable subject matter in a deeply affecting way. A book about forging dignity in a world of tragedy, and raising issues about immigration and asylum-seekers through the story of one woman’s plight, Dalila is a necessary tale of our times. It is also a work of great literary power: a slow-burning, spell-binding novel about how we treat the vulnerable and dispossessed that will leave its readers devastated.

Jason Donald

Reads like a dream, races along and open-heartedly reveals one corrupt road by which boys should not become men.

Choke Chain completely and triumphantly defines its own territory - the novel's restraint concealing its building power and its huge compassion.

His writing is clear and ungilded as he captures the experience of growing up under big African skies, and shows us Alex's world in all its freshness and promise... This is an exceptional debut

An uncompromising piece about the lives of impoverished white South Africans, written in a style which owed something to Raymond Carver’s laconic, chiselled sentences

'An exceptional debut' Independent 
 
Alex is twelve, and he lives with his younger brother and his parents in a dirt-poor white neighbourhood in 1980s South Africa. He and Kevin are trying to grow up, while their mother, Grace, is simply trying to keep them safe. Apart from the usual lessons of childhood, the boys are finding out about deceit, petty crime and casual violence, and the person that's teaching them is their father. A devious, self-centred, volatile man, Bruce Thorne sees the world as a battleground where the winner is the one who throws the first punch. Ruling the family through fear, it is only when he abandons them for a teenage lover that their problems really begin. 
 
Exposing the rotten, insidious patterns of fathering that most societies still ignore, Choke Chain shows two boys struggling to find steady ground in a disintegrating household. Watching quietly as their mother diminishes in the black light of her husband, they learn that not all adults are right and true - that some have evil bred, or beaten, into them. 
 
Opening with a thunderstorm and hail 'the size of apricots', this extraordinary first novel is a series of emotional storms and aftershocks, with any brightness on the horizon shadowed by gathering dark. Beautifully written and intensely moving, the novel builds to the drama of its conclusion: the turbulence turning to frenzy and clearing, finally, to some redemptive light.

Jason Donald

Praise for Choke Chain

Reads like a dream, races along and open-heartedly reveals one corrupt road by which boys should not become men.

Choke Chain completely and triumphantly defines its own territory - the novel's restraint concealing its building power and its huge compassion.

His writing is clear and ungilded as he captures the experience of growing up under big African skies, and shows us Alex's world in all its freshness and promise... This is an exceptional debut

Reads like a dream, races along and open-heartedly reveals one corrupt road by which boys should not become men.

Choke Chain completely and triumphantly defines its own territory - the novel's restraint concealing its building power and its huge compassion.

His writing is clear and ungilded as he captures the experience of growing up under big African skies, and shows us Alex's world in all its freshness and promise... This is an exceptional debut

Reads like a dream, races along and open-heartedly reveals one corrupt road by which boys should not become men.

Choke Chain completely and triumphantly defines its own territory - the novel's restraint concealing its building power and its huge compassion.

His writing is clear and ungilded as he captures the experience of growing up under big African skies, and shows us Alex's world in all its freshness and promise... This is an exceptional debut

Books by Jason Donald

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