South African Historical Novelist
Clive Algar was born in Cape Town in 1942 and has also lived in Johannesburg, Namibia and London. He was a group executive in an international mining company and started writing fiction when he retired and returned to South Africa.
His first novel, Journeys to the End of the World, was published in 2007, and his second, Flowers in the Sand, in 2011. His third novel, Comets, was published as an eBook in 2013. He was invited to contribute a short story to a new Afrikaans anthology of Boer War stories (Boereoorlogstories 2) which was published by Tafelberg in 2012. His story “The Twins” appears in translation.
Talking about Books
The Tree of Man
After my first reading of The Tree of Man, by Patrick White, about twenty years ago, I put it back on my bookshelves uncertain whether or not I had enjoyed it. It was so rough-textured and densely written that it demanded more effort on my part than I was happy to...
The Novels of Richard Hughes
After close on forty years I have just re-read three novels by Richard Hughes: "A High Wind in Jamaica", "The Fox In the Attic" and "The Wooden Shepherdess". I can remember how much I enjoyed them in the 1970s but the stories themselves had blurred and faded in my...
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
One day, when I was a young teenager in the 1950s, my parents and I were introduced to a man who had met Lawrence of Arabia in Damascus in 1917. Lawrence had been wearing Arab dress, but his blue eyes had revealed his identity. T E Lawrence became one of the most...