Soetwater: Life in the Klein Karoo

These stories about life in a small Karoo town sparkle with humour and delight. Set in the mid to late 1940s, a time when the deprivation and suffering caused by the Second World War were beginning to lift, and people were starting to look to a more hopeful future, they draw on the rich tradition of South African storytelling in the Pauline Smith and Herman Charles Bosman vein, and will captivate readers with their optimism and insight.

Stan Schoeman spent most of his adolescent years in a town like Soetwater, and draws upon his recollections, impressions, observation and personal experience to describe what it is like. A town by this name does not appear on any South African map, but there are countless like it, populated by people not unlike the characters who appear in this book, interacting with each other in an environment where a scarcity of material goods does not prevent them from having fun.