The Dubious Salvation Of Jack V.

Smart, funny, touching and a little dangerous, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V. is a powerful coming-of-age story from an original voice.

Very, very funny... It is an utter delight, astute and knowing. Wonderful writing

Sarah Winman, author of WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT

Strauss writes with poise and comic timing.  His prose is formal and correct; he establishes a tone of laconic regret yet sustains a striking lightness of touch particularly in passages of dialogue...It is, above all, rich in symbols and subtexts

Smart, charming, funny, highly astute and subtly political. A really terrific read

Jacques Strauss was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. His first book, The Dubious Salvation of Jack V, won the Commonwealth Book Prize, Africa. He lives in London with his partner and works as a freelance writer.

It's 1989, and in the dying years of the Apartheid regime, eleven-year-old Jack Viljee considers life to be simple. He has firm views on race (complex), politics (straightforward), poofdas (inoffensive), God (dangerous) and sex (bewildering). The son of an Afrikaans father and an English mother, wedged between a strident older and a favoured younger sister, Jack allies himself with the family's beloved maid, Susie. 
 
But the Viljee household has been upset by the arrival of Percy, Susie's fifteen-year-old son. Percy - young, bored and full of rage - makes everything awkward and embarassing for Jack. After one particularly humiliating event, Jack betrays Susie. The world, it turns out, is not so simple.

Jacques Strauss

With its forcefully characterised anti-hero Werner, this is a book that will conjure favourable comparisons with other South African literary masters.

Murder is everywhere you look in this dark and gripping novel, but it’s often achingly funny.

Strauss mixes two narratives together with ease, and comes up with a novel that sparkles.

The Curator is a very interesting and compelling read.

Longlisted for the 2015 Green Carnation Prize 
 
It's not possible to undo what happened in 1976. 
 
In rural South Africa a family massacre takes place; a bloodbath whose only witness is the family’s black maid. Hendrik Deyer is the principal of a state-run school camp who lives nearby with his wife and their two sons, Werner and Marius. As Hendrik becomes obsessed with uncovering what happened, his wife worries about her neighbours, a poor white family whose malign influence on her son Werner is – she believes – making his behaviour inexplicably strange and hostile. One night another tragedy changes each of their lives, irrevocably. 
 
Two decades later, Werner is living with his mother and invalid father in a small Pretoria flat. South Africa is a changed place. Werner holds a tedious job in the administration department of the local university and dreams of owning his own gallery. His father is bedridden, hovering on the edge of death, and furious, as he has been for twenty years. As Werner feels his own life slip away, his thoughts turn to murder as a means to correct the course of all their futures. He can't undo the past, but Werner’s desperation to change his own his fate will threaten not only his own family but also those still living in the aftermath of what happened all those years ago.

Jacques Strauss

Praise for The Curator

With its forcefully characterised anti-hero Werner, this is a book that will conjure favourable comparisons with other South African literary masters.

Murder is everywhere you look in this dark and gripping novel, but it’s often achingly funny.

Strauss mixes two narratives together with ease, and comes up with a novel that sparkles.

With its forcefully characterised anti-hero Werner, this is a book that will conjure favourable comparisons with other South African literary masters.

Murder is everywhere you look in this dark and gripping novel, but it’s often achingly funny.

Strauss mixes two narratives together with ease, and comes up with a novel that sparkles.

With its forcefully characterised anti-hero Werner, this is a book that will conjure favourable comparisons with other South African literary masters.

Murder is everywhere you look in this dark and gripping novel, but it’s often achingly funny.

Strauss mixes two narratives together with ease, and comes up with a novel that sparkles.

Books by Jacques Strauss

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