Spud

"In our country, even the white writers have unpronounceable names. It’s about a South African boarding school, a pseudo British school – like the one I attended, which pretended it was Harrow – where life is regulated by rules, hierarchy and a mix of proud and humiliating traditions. People in South Africa, particularly white South Africans, love these schools. They get rid of their children as soon as possible, in my case at the age of nine, to send them to these schools. Spud is about an underdog white kid who gets up to the usual tricks at one of these schools. Spud is funny but I think its popularity demonstrates nostalgia for the old order that these schools represented. Yes. Like Catcher in the Rye , it is a bestseller. Spud is the largest-selling novel in South African history. It sold something like 80,000 or 100,000 copies. We didn’t even think that there were that many South Africans who were literate."