FATHER MICHAEL'S LOTTERY, a novel

380pp., paperback, Revised Edition, Johannesburg, (2005) 2019

Reprint of a novel about a doctor battling against the Aids pandemic in a small hospital in an African town.

"Father Michael's Lottery is in a class of its own. In a series of tragi-comic poignant vignettes, it explores the life of a community in rural Africa struggling with twin plagues of poverty and disease. Johan Steyn's achievement is to handle his subject with a light touch, in prose that makes the precarious spaces of death-in-life. and life-in-death, strangely human and inhabitable." Professor David Attwell, English Language and Literature, University of York

"Moving, bleakly funny, a dispatch from the front line." Justin Cartwright, In Every Face I Meet and Up Against the Night

"Father Michael's Lottery is a great-spirited novel that tells its tale - about a committed doctor's search for more 'happy endings' in all-too-unpromising circumstances - with heart and passion and hope." Edwin Cameron, author of Witness to Aids and Justice

Johan Steyn is a medical doctor who has worked and travelled extensively in Africa.