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Book of the Week Special at The Book Lounge: The Fourth Boy by Andrew Robert Wilson

Journalist Grant Asher (1980s Cape Town) gets told by his mother on her deathbed that his father (who was unknown to Grant) was both gay and Jewish. Grant decides to try to find his father, which leads him to Oudtsthoorn and the news that his father has just been murdered. Grant becomes a somewhat reluctant investigator which leads him to suspect that there may be a serial killer murdering people who were part of a group of the five hundred Polish Jewish orphans who were freed from Siberia in the 1940s and were taken in by South Africa. ~ Mervyn Sloman

Set mostly in the Klein Karoo, The Fourth Boy explores notions of belonging and a myriad of other longings which I found profoundly moving. It tells the story of a young man’s search for his father against the backdrop of the 80s in apartheid South Africa and the fate of five hundred Polish WWII refugee children who arrived in Oudtshoorn in 1943. It is also a story of love, loss and betrayal. The tenderness with which Andrew Robert Wilson portrays the relationships – love and friendship – at the centre of the novel – is remarkable, and the way he resolves its greatest mystery is simply masterful. ~ Karina Szczurek, Karavan Press

You can purchase the book here (20% off):

The Book Lounge Book of the Week Special

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Karavan Press title: The Fourth Boy by Andrew Robert Wilson

I’d had my flash of that. I’d let down the drawbridge and got galloped over. I think. It was not a sense of self-pity. More like exhaustion. Like twenty years crushed into a dense mass the equivalent of a day. A day or so where time did not slow down, but stood completely, beautifully still.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The fondly nurtured idyll of the Karoo as a place of tranquillity is shattered when recently graduated journalist Grant Asher’s first real investigative assignment in the mid-1980s draws him into a series of unexplained murders in three quiet Karoo towns. There are two mystifying links: the victims were once part of a group of five hundred Polish-Jewish children housed at an orphanage in Oudtshoorn during the Second World War, and each victim was missing the tip of their little finger, removed post mortem. Exquisitely written, Wilson’s debut novel will stay with you long after the last page is turned. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREW ROBERT WILSON has been in the media and entertainment industry for nearly forty years, variously as actor, voice artist, TV presenter, writer for television and film, and series director of international TV formats. He was a theatre critic for the Mail & Guardian in the late 1990s, and worked extensively over the years in wildlife and conservation television. He was one of twenty authors published in the Short.Sharp.Stories anthology Fluid. He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Rhodes University in 1985. The Fourth Boy is his debut novel.

Publication date: February 2025

ISBN: 978-1-0672224-4-4