WE ARE DELIGHTED TO ANNOUNCE THAT KARAVAN PRESS IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION PARTNER FOR GLASS TOWER BY SARAH ISAACS, THE INAUGURAL WINNER OF THE ISLAND PRIZE.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Leilah meets Frankie, and the two misfits become the closest of friends at their new school – until secrets, betrayal, and sexuality drive them apart …
It’s 1997, three years after the official end of Apartheid in South Africa. Two girls from very different backgrounds, Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white, are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other a secret. The girls must grapple with young womanhood alone, leaving Leila with only her troubled family to fall back on.
Glass Tower is a powerful, beautiful story of two young people on a journey of sexual hurt and personal discovery which asks questions of who we are and why we love, set against a new and confusing social order.
Winner of the 2022 Island Prize for debut African novels
‘Sarah Isaacs writes with sensitivity and care about the pains of adolescence in a changing society coming to terms with the dark history of South Africa.’ — Karen Jennings, An Island, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH ISAACS is a writer and visual storyteller based in Cape Town, South Africa. Born in 1985 to a Coloured father and white mother, she occupied an undefinable place within the Apartheid system of racial division. Not belonging to one group or another has informed much of her life experience and continues to be one of the key drivers in her work. After graduating from a psychology degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2009, Sarah shifted her professional focus to portrait and documentary photography, creating safe spaces for South African women to share their everyday struggles. Boosted by the voices of those women she photographed, she was able to explore her own relationship to issues of identity, gender-based violence and the impact of infertility on a woman’s sense of self. In 2018, she invited victims of GBV to be photographed as a way of sharing their stories of sexual trauma and turned the lessons she learnt from that portrait series into a 2019 TEDx talk, which centred on survivor shame and its implications for the expression of vulnerability. Sarah completed Glass Tower in 2021. It went on to win The Island Prize for debut fiction from Africa in 2022.
Publisher: Holland House Books, UK
Publication date: 24 August 2023
ISBN: 978-1-7391047-4-0
karavanpress.com 
VERY much look fwd to reading this, and hearing more from the author.
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