A HIBISCUS COAST, a novel

323pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2021

Nick Mulgrew's debut novel, set in South Africa and New Zealand.

“Mulgrew deftly draws comparisons between two narratives of land ownership and dispossession [with] finely developed, sometimes messy, characters [who] have been deeply affected by life events, losses and prejudices. A beautifully written, carefully researched novel on a difficult subject.”  Business Day

“A Hibiscus Coast is ambitious – funny and beautiful and heartbreaking, sometimes simultaneously. Mulgrew invokes and then banishes the wishes, regrets, dreams and frustrations that plague us. How difficult it is to write powerfully and meaningfully about feelings; our personal revelations are mostly boring to others. But his technique is persuasive, at once chattily vernacular and then so lyrical he could name new palettes for Plascon. It's lucky we have writers as talented as Mulgrew to guide us on our journeys.” Sunday Times

Nick Mulgrew was born in Durban in 1990 and grew up in uMhlanga and Auckland. He is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar and the director of the poetry press, uHlanga. Currently he lives in Edinburgh where he is a PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. He is the author of two collections of short fiction, The First Law of Sadness (2018 Nadine Gordimer Award) and Stations, and The myth of this is that we're all in this together, a collection of poems. He won the 2016 Thomas Pringle Award for his short story ’1-HR FOTO’, published in Oppikoppi’s annual zine, Ons Klyntji (2016), and in Stations.