Tsk-Tsk

'I was made in Coffee Bay. Right there on the beach, in the sand.' From the opening lines, we are drawn in and engrossed by this startling memoir of a singular childhood. Suzan is adopted as a newborn in the late 1960s into a seemingly loving and welcoming family living in Pietermaritzburg. But Suzan is set on a collision course with, most particularly, her adoptive mother, and society, from her very beginning. Suzan's relationship with her mother is fraught with drama, which veers over into a level of emotional abuse and needless cruelty that is shocking. At the age of thirteen, Suzan is sent to a place of safety as a ward of the state, effectively 'orphaning' her. From there, she spirals out of control - fighting to survive in a world of other neglected, abandoned and abused children. She becomes a 'runner', escaping at every opportunity from her various places of confinement, grabbing her schooling in snatches, living on the edges of a drug and prostitution underworld, finding love wherever she can. Suzan's young life was the stuff of movies, but it is her writing, in a voice that is unforgettable and true, that transforms her memories into something magical rarely matched in South African literature. A new classic.

SUZAN HACKNEY was born in Pretoria, but grew up in Pietermaritzburg, as she tells of in her memoirs Tsk-Tsk. After the events of her childhood and adolescence described here, she worked as a night-club bouncer, a stable hand on a horse stud farm and she farmed. She has grown aloes and other indigenous plants, reared orphaned and injured wildlife, and raised her own children - and a few who weren't her own. Suzan now manages a resort in the southern Drakensberg.