Books by John Eppel

Eppel's poems are images from nature and loaded with more than nostalgia. See them as flowers laid like wreaths at the site of man's inhumanity to man. Born in South Africa in 1947, John Eppel was raised in Zimbabwe, where he still lives. His first novel, D G G Berry's The Great North Road, won the M-Net prize and was listed in the Weekly Mail & Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English published between 1948 and 1994.

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, ehis pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.i When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with Georgeis lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before itis time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests n all timed to coincide with the police chiefis need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his familyis Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.