Book Review: You will be Safe here

Title: You will be Safe here
Author: Damian Barr
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 346
ISBN: 978-1526608734
Source: Publsiher

You will be Safe here tells two stirring and connected stories spanning over a century.  Set in South Africa and told in three parts, the events in the novel take place in 1901 during the second Boer War and then in Johannesburg of the late 20th century, culminating finally in 2015.

South Africa, 1901, the height of the second Boer War. Sarah and her son are taken to Bloemfontein Concentration Camp where, the English promise, they will be safe.

Johannesburg, 2010, Sixteen-year-old outsider Willem is sent by his parents to New Dawn Safari Training Camp. Here they ‘make men out of boys’- guaranteed.

The premise of the novel is quite gripping and grapples the reader at once. The author has employed two different narrators in the novel. The part involving the war times…