Skin (A Novel)

Skin, my debut novel, was published by Night Forest Press  in July 2026.

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Skin, the porous boundary where we meet, touch, bleed. And in apartheid South Africa, a border that for some, cannot be crossed. Seventeen-year-old Danny is White. Sophia is mixed race, so-called ‘Coloured.’ Their love, forbidden inside the country of their birth, can only exist within the cocoon of Glencairn, a multiracial boarding school nestled in the hills of neighbouring Swaziland.

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Until, for reasons unknown, Danny and Sophia are kicked out. Severed from his love, Danny spends the long, hot summer of 1969, unmoored and alone, wandering the nocturnal streets of Johannesburg, careening between paralyzing grief and incandescent rage. Newly alive to South Africa’s racial cruelties, he begins to peel back childhood’s certainties and comforts, exposing the wounds, hypocrisies and sins of his country, his family and his conflicted self. As Danny contemplates a dangerous act to blow it all up, he must ask himself, is he hero or hypocrite?

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To order a copy of Skin, go to Night Forest Press.

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Listen to me read an excerpt from an earlier version of Skin, in Layers of Exile, a podcast on Writers Radio (writersradio.ca/podcasts/) by clicking on the button below. The podcast also includes two poems from my poetry collection, Refugee Song, and an interview with host, Ingrid Rose.