Leaving Word

1. One of South Africa?s most celebrated literary fiction writers has taken a detour into death, mystery and crime. Steven Boykey Sidley, award-winning, multi-shortlisted and internationally published author, has written a startling new work, which will hit the shelves in September.

Leaving Word is a literary mystery in which the mysterious death of Buddy Rappaport, the CEO of a major publishing company, sets off a probing, occasionally comic, occasionally tragic and intellectually wide-ranging search for plot, meaning, reason and motive.

Heroine and protagonist Joelle Jesson, the 40-year-old senior editor of the publishing house, although having been fired by the CEO only hours before his death, is determined to find out what happened. She is smart, confused, sexy, sassy, lonely, ambitious and determined ? an explosive and memorable character on the page.

Was Buddy murdered? Did he commit suicide? And who was involved? The detective and aspirant author who has just sent Joelle a manuscript, the plot of which is eerily similar to the circumstances of Buddy?s death? The dark and inscrutable brother of the CEO, painting and drawing nudes in his nondescript apartment? Or the sad and deluded loner trying and failing to sell his illiterate scribblings to anyone who will listen?

Or maybe Buddy just died. Maybe life doesn?t always have a plot.

Steven Boykey Sidley, who has been variously compared by reviewers here and abroad to Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Richard Power and Joseph Heller, is widely admired for his writing, dialogue, humour and plot. Leaving Word will please his loyal fans and find an entirely new audience among lovers of crime and mystery.

Sidley recently formed a literary publishing alliance with award-winning publisher Melinda Ferguson. Leaving Word will be released under her imprint MFBooks Joburg.

The book has also been picked up by the prestigious literary agency Liza Dawson Associated in New York, and is currently on submission in the US.