Before I Forget by André Brink

Chris Minaar is a writer; a distinguished South African writer, an old writer, a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year's Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress, a good Samaritan who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled. Having believed that his remaining function should be to comfort his mother, more than a century old but now inclined to talk with alarming frankness about her life, he finds himself captivated by Rachel and drawn into a close friendship with her photographer husband George.

As their friendship develops Chris must reconcile himself to an unaccustomed type of intimacy but one that inevitably threatens this precarious triangular relationship. Woven through this is the story of his life and of a lifetime's loving. For he has known many women in his time. Brief affairs, extended affairs, a marriage; intensely carnal encounters and tender attachments; women who leave him unexpectedly, those whose leaving is agonisingly protracted and those, perhaps the greater number, who never really go at all.

From Daphne, the troubled dancer, to Bonnie, his authoritarian father's secretary, and Grethe, who arranges for her many lovers to meet at a party in her absence, these women define and inform his life. As it becomes clear that this book is the final writing act of Chris's creative life so we understand that the recollection of these many loves is an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. Erotic, searingly honest, elegaic and profoundly moving, Before I Forget is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love.

André Brink is the author of fifteen novels in English, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire and, most recently, The Other Side of Silence. He has won South Africa's most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into thirty languages. André Brink is Professor of English at the University of Cape Town.