On that Wave of Gulls, by Vernon R.L. Head

“The only thing that seagulls ever want is the fucking sea.”

From the bestselling author of The Search for the Rarest Bird in the World comes On That Wave of Gulls. An audacious novel, the tale is told by three characters – an architect, a Khoisan vagrant and a seagull, all of whom recount their lives in Cape Town.

Hieronymus Vos is an overweight, white architect, recently fallen on hard times, and married to a beautiful, black British-Caribbean woman. Although he hates the ocean, his practice has, until recently, been doing very well by designing glitzy millionaires’ mansions on the Atlantic Seaboard. Pooi is a homeless man, recently arrived from the Kalahari, with a patchy grip on reality. He thinks he is the moon and wants to teach himself to swim so that he can reach Robben Island and fulfil a promise. The third narrator is Calypso, a female seagull who needs to find a mate and lay an egg to pass on her legacy and her identity.

On That Wave of Gulls is a shrewd and lyrical tour de force by a natural storyteller.