AWOL in Swaziland in 1981, I came across Nelson Mandela's book, No Easy Walk to Freedom. It was a time when I had difficulty with any reading besides pornography and Doris Lessing. The devils of the military were on my tail and I struggled to concentrate. But I read Mandela's speech from the dock and finally realized why he was in jail. It came as a shock because it was so simple. So down home, common sense simple. The lies about why he was in jail were convoluted and gothic. I grew up on gruel of those lies.

I was born in South Africa in 1955 and until I fled the army I had little idea who Nelson Mandela was. I grew up on a farm called Highlands in the Amatole Mountains. Amatole is a Xhosa word meaning "the calves". The Xhosa are a cattle-loving nation and the name is a measure of their affection for the high forests and grasslands where they took refuge from their enemies, and fattened their cattle when the pastures were sweet.

"Pure Fiction" is a memoir with novel elements. On a peak overlooking Highlands, my father is in conversation with a Xhosa Chieftain. The men, long dead, observe my life as I pass through childhood, education and a kind war. And they swap stories. Rharhabe tells of the cattle killing, and the hundred-year conflict that ended with his land passing into English hands. My father tells of his battle with the Hun, and of the English bullet that sent him to Africa so that he could marry a German and buy the land that once belonged to Rharhabe's people.

The book is about growing up in white, rural, South African under apartheid. It's about the landscape, and the extraordinary coupling of European and African cultures.