Some stories can glue you to the page because of what they say, others because of how they say it. Byron Loker’s stories do both. His tales will ring true for all South Africans who have ever surfed, or sat with an old railway man or a car guard or domestic workers. Loker has a clear eye on ordinary daily life. He is funny most of the time, but often very poignant too, in these beautifully crafted stories.
Prescribed for English Literature Study Short Stories Grade 9 – Western Cape Education Department
Publisher (this edition): Karavan Press (first published by Double Storey Books, a division of Juta & Co. Ltd 2006)
ISBN: 978-1-7764064-2-5
Publication date: January 2024
Praise for New Swell
‘… modern-day South African Beat, easy to read, sharply observed, engaging, sad, but also very funny’ – Surfers’ Path
‘If the flat naturalism recalls Hemingway, other stories, in their deliberately straight-faced contemplation of horrors, recall Bosman’ – Sunday Independent
‘… wit engaged with the human condition at a deeper level of meaning’ – Sunday Times
‘… stories different from anything that has been written in English in South Africa – they are fresh, honest, off the wall but simultaneously clear moments of everyday life. At the same time they owe much in tone and style to the work of Herman Charles Bosman without being in any way imitative. It is as if the short story tradition, which was interrupted by the dictates of apartheid, has been resumed’ – Mike Nicol
‘Stories with a light touch which has the effect, as such touches at best can do, of dredging up certain shadows or resonances that go on resonating … very affecting – and stylistically – sure-footed to a fault’ – Stephen Watson
‘… a particularly gifted and dedicated writer’ – André Brink
BYRON LOKER has been called by fellow South African man of letters, Ben Trovato, ‘a talented writer who could go far if only he’d give up surfing and chasing women.’ He was once a film student but is now fully rehabilitated. His literary hero is Ernest Hemingway, as you can probably tell by these staccato sentences. He lives in the ‘deep south’ of the Cape Peninsula with a very sweet ginger tabby cat named Georgie Love and a pile of regrets, chief among them being all the women who got away from him.
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