Skip to product information
1 of 1

Jonathan Ball

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

Regular price R 185.00 ZAR
Regular price Sale price R 185.00 ZAR
Sale Sold out
Taxes included.

Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens - on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles - the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral.

Fuelled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident - the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins - he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

View full details
Colourful cubes that hold books at outdoor street library in Soweto

Give a book

Buy an extra copy of your book and we'll donate it to one of our outdoor Street Libraries, or to one of our reading programmes. Just add a note to your card with the code #buyabookforachild.