So, here it is: the first ever reading from my first ever novel! Where else would I read it for the first time?! It’s such a privilege to have all you Salonistas along with me on this journey. I am interviewed by Kirsty Wark – lucky me!

The novel has already been previewed in the Guardian, Observer & Financial Times. Here is what the Big Issue had to say in their look ahead to 2019:

‘Maggie and Me introduced the world to a startlingly clear and honest working class voice, but for his debut novel Damian Barr has chosen to travel thousands of miles from the North Lanarkshire setting of his lauded memoir. You Will be Safe Here tells the stories of two families separated by a century, but symbolically and viscerally connected. The oppression of a South African family rounded into a concentration camp by English soldiers during the second Boer War is echoed in the modern-day story of Johannesburg teenager Willem, who is ‘not turning out right’ and is sent to a brutal training camp to have his too-soft corners sharpened up.

The landscape and vernacular couldn’t be more different from Barr’s own childhood homestead, but the themes he understands so well, and writes about so simply and evocatively, remain: the cruel, isolating experience of being bullied by a knuckle-headed majority; the sweet relief in finding a sympathetic friend among the angry, contemptuous throng. Without melodrama or sentiment, Barr is proving himself a master of show-don’t-tell writing which packs a hefty emotional punch. He seems to do it just by listening, thinking, then letting the words flow. Extraordinary. (Jane Graham)’

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