A novella by Michael Clark

Author’s Preface

Brian Jackson was a real man I once knew — restless, gentle, and exiled in ways geography couldn’t measure. He had lived half his life in South Africa, half in Britain, and belonged completely to neither. When I last saw him, he was sleeping rough, chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, and trying to quiet the ghosts of a single night when he had killed three men to save his own life. Later, he found a kind of peace through a small Catholic church and the patience of strangers.

This story is not biography. It’s a work of fiction that borrows his outline and his silences — a portrait of displacement, guilt, and survival in the long shadow of exile.