The New Novel · Coming Soon
Franki
A Novel in Progress · Spencer Rowley
Nineteen, broke, and done waiting for her life to start somewhere else. One Tuesday morning, she goes south.
Nineteen, broke, and done waiting for her life to start somewhere else. One Tuesday morning, she goes south.
A girl leaves Johannesburg with a backpack and two thousand rand — and the road takes it from there.
Franki Van der Berg is nineteen. She has a backpack with a broken zip, the last of the money from a café job she's already quit, and a list of people she has decided she no longer needs — her mother, the boyfriend who loves her too carefully, the city that never once felt like hers. One ordinary Tuesday she leaves the keys on the kitchen counter and flags down a taxi heading south.
What follows is told in a chorus of voices: the people she runs from, the ones who go looking for her, and the strangers whose lives she crosses on the long road between the city and the coast. It is a novel about belonging and escape, about the families we're handed and the ones we cobble together — and about who you decide to trust when the road is dark and the rain won't stop.
I've got my backpack on the bed. I keep looking at it and then looking away from it, which is stupid — it's just a backpack with some stuff in it. Some clean clothes, a toothbrush, the charger for my phone, the envelope with what's left of the money from the café job I quit last month. Roughly two thousand rand. Enough to get somewhere and eat until I figure out the next thing.
I'm nineteen years old and I have a backpack and two thousand rand and I'm going south, anywhere south, and that's enough for me. That has to be enough.
From an early draft — a work in progress
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Born in Rhodesia and shaped by thirty-three years in South Africa, Spencer Rowley has been a soldier, a policeman, an IT consultant, an artist, and a musician. His novel Sawubona and his award-winning play Waiting for John draw on a life lived across many continents. He now lives in Nottingham, England.