Welcome, Mr. Stranger

Sixteen year old Noah is living in one of Cape Town’s better neighbourhoods. He’s a black adopted boy, in a white world, a child of the new South Africa – the rainbow nation. But still the question necessitates itself: Where does he really come from? Maybe the answer is in the great slum outside of the city. A coincidence puts him on the track, and Noah sets out on the journey of his life.

In the winter of 1652, Jan van Riebeck sets sail for the Cape. His mission is to establish a trading post on the southern tip of Africa for the Dutch East India Company. But his journey and mission become far more difficult than he had imagined. Can he trust the natives, and his own crew?

In the middle of the 1990s, Simon Stranger crosses the Atlantic in a small sailboat. The passage is dramatic, but they make it in the end. Arriving in Trinidad, he’s told that his father is dying. Simon goes home and sits by his father’s sickbed for six weeks, not knowing if he will survive.

Welcome, Mr. Stranger consists of several dramatic stories that at the same time are connected in a moving and original way. The novel moves far away both in time and space, between fiction and reality, and all the time something is at stake, for the characters and, not least, for the author himself.