![cover of the book Tsk-Tsk: The story of a child at large](/covers/files_200/3575000/d8ec2af9f2fbfacbfc29acf21bbcb2e5-g.jpg)
Ebook: Tsk-Tsk: The story of a child at large
Author: Suzan Hackney
- Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, BIO026000
- Year: 2018
- Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
- Language: English
- epub
'I was made in Coffee Bay. Right there on the beach, in the sand.' From the opening lines, we are drawn in and engrossed by this startling memoir of a singular childhood. Suzan is adopted as a newborn in the late 1960s into a seemingly loving and welcoming family living in Pietermaritzburg. But Suzan is set on a collision course with, most particularly, her adoptive mother, and society, from her very beginning. Suzan's relationship with her mother is fraught with drama, which veers over into a level of emotional abuse and needless cruelty that is shocking.
At the age of thirteen, Suzan is sent to a place of safety as a ward of the state, effectively 'orphaning' her. From there, she spirals out of control – fighting to survive in a world of other neglected, abandoned and abused children. She becomes a 'runner', escaping at every opportunity from her various places of confinement, grabbing her schooling in snatches, living on the edges of a drug and prostitution underworld, finding love wherever she can.
Suzan's young life was the stuff of movies, but it is her writing, in a voice that is unforgettable and true, that transforms her memories into something magical rarely matched in South African literature. A new classic.