Birthmark: A hologram

By (author): Stephen Clingman. Stephen Clingman's memoir uses a failed childhood eye surgery — which left him with altered vision after a birthmark operation — as a lens for exploring memory, perception, and apartheid-era South Africa's racial classifications. Set across three continents, it connects his own "divided vision in a divided world" to broader questions of how physical and social markings shape consciousness. Jacana's description calls it not a coming-of-age story but "a book...of the coming of perspective," painful and comic by turns but ultimately uplifting.