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The 2011 Award

 

Pauw

Little Ice Cream Boy

by Jacques Pauw

 

 

 

Nominated by:

  • City of Johannesburg Library & Information Services, South Africa.

 

Publisher of Nominated Edition:

Penguin Books South Africa

 

the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors
ABOUT THE BOOK

From the photograph she keeps beside her bed, Maria Goosen will always remember her son as her ‘little ice cream boy’, smiling from the frame on a beach in Margate with a cone in his hand. Everyone else knows Gideon Goosen as a monster: a gangster, assassin and murderer, who made a pact with the devil and deserves to live out his days in a solitary cell in Pretoria Central. How is it possible that the son of a decorated, God-fearing security policeman could fall so low? 
His mother blames it on his friends from the other side of the railway line in Randfontein, others on a leggy prostitute from Nigel who became his obsession. Gideon himself believes everything changed on an autumn morning when the fatal pellets from a pump-action shotgun cut short 
the life of an anti-apartheid activist in the driveway of his home. 

 
(From Publisher).

 

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jacques Pauw author of Little Ice-Cream boyis one of Africa’s most prominent and decorated journalists. He has spent most of his twenty-four years in journalism at the forefront of South Africa and the continent’s most telling developments, whether it was exposing Apartheid’s death squads in South Africa, making television documentaries about the genocide in Rwanda, telling the story of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, crossing the Sahara in search of the fabled Timbuktu manuscripts or covering South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In the late eighties he was a founder member and assistant editor of the anti-Apartheid Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad (Free Weekly). Afterwards he became the investigations editor of The Star newspaper, a founder member of the SABC’s Truth Commission Special Report and founder member and head of Special Assignment, the SABC’s premier current affairs show. He resigned from the SABC in September 2007 and is currently a freelance journalist.

He has been named as South Africa’s Journalist of the Year and was twice CNN’s African Journalist of the Year. 
 
 
Pauw has written several non-fiction books. Little Ice Cream Boy is his first work of fiction and has been shortlisted for the 2010 M-Net Literary Awards. 

LIBRARIAN'S COMMENTS

Jacques Pauw's novel is based on the life of Ferdi Barnard, the gangster and convicted apartheid assassin, currently sentenced to serve three life sentences for the murder of academic David Webster. The story, which is based on real events, follows the life journey of Gideon Goosen, an inmate of Pretoria Central Prison, from the past into the present. Goosen, who had a typical South African working class home in the sixties, later becomes a member of an elite apartheid killing squad.

Little Ice Cream Boy is a shattering, real story that took place in a society governed by apartheid - it exposes the raw brutality of both the police and gangsterism.

 

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