GLASS TOWER, my debut novel

Perhaps it’s because I’m a photographer but when I was thinking about how to start this book I kept coming back to an image of a pebble landing in water and sending out ripples in all directions. I wasn’t yet sure who my characters were going to be, what obstacles they would face and how the storyline would play out, but I knew I was interested in the way pain travels. I’m easily overwhelmed when I think about family trauma – how it spreads from one member to another, both in the present and intergenerationally through time – and that simple image of a stone hitting the water helped to calm the jumble in my head and get me going.

I’m a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse and it was only in my mid-thirties that I began to appreciate the implications of that wound for my parents and brother, how it blended and bumped up against their own wounding and set off a sequence of emotional responses that continue to this day. I wanted to explore what the pain of a victim’s family might look like, to give the ripples a face and a name and to situate them in the larger context of South Africa trying to recover from its own deep wounds.

That is how I came to land on my central characters - Leilah, a young woman coming to grips and her parents Elke and Dwight.

Leilah meets Frankie, and the two misfits become the closest of friends at their new school – until secrets, betrayal, and sexuality drive them apart…

It’s 1997, three years after the official end of Apartheid in South Africa. Two girls from very different backgrounds – Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white – are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other a secret. The girls must grapple with young womanhood alone, leaving Leilah with only her troubled family to fall back on.

Glass Tower is a powerful story of two young people on a journey of sexual hurt and personal discovery which asks questions of who we are and why we love, set against a new and confusing social order.