The Nicotine Gospel

A gothic coming-of-age novel with a dash of road tripping, this book might also be described as a dark and quirky Grimms Brothers fairytale set in South Africa, with a father who as a writer has all the words at his disposal but no clue about using them for conventional parenting. It’s clever, ironic, painfully raw and funny. Nate is six, and his brother Danny just four years old when their mother dies, leaving their eccentric, reserved father to care for them. Esben – once a famous novelist – has withdrawn into himself, and does so even more on the death of his wife. He does emerge periodically to give the two little boys life lessons framed around cigarette smoking, but while being steeped in behavioural psychology has some obvious advantages, it doesn’t keep the house clean or the school schedule going. It also doesn’t give the boys much scope for expressing their own feelings. They slowly learn to fend for themselves and each other as they watch their father closely for mood changes before the equivalent of a wicked stepmother appears (soon, she will go up in smoke). Axelrad’s depiction of the father’s mysteriousness to his sons, the signs and portents they find to make sense of their smaller, urgent worlds, and their own savagely difficult childhoods, is rendered with great tenderness.