Life Underwater | General Fiction

Ken Barris

In this fifth novel by the award-winning poet and writer Ken Barris, life in the 1960s in Port Elizabeth comes under the microscope. Life Underwater tells the story of the three Machabeus brothers: Jude, Simon and younger Eli, first as children and teenagers, and then as grown men upon the death of their father. While there may be nothing new under the sun, in the hands of a writer as skilled as Barris the material of family life is here wrought into something compelling, beautiful and visceral – magnifying the tragedies, and singular triumphs, of the everyday.

From the Sunday Independent:
“Ken Barris’s skilled writing . . . moulds the ordinary into something extraordinary and impresses upon the audience a range of emotions that linger long after the last line has been read.”