Embrace is the story of the awakening of Karl De Man, a thirteen-year-old student at the Berg, an exclusive academy for boys in South Africa in the 1970s. The events of Karl's school life are interwoven with memories from his childhood and first years at the Berg, as he falls in love with both his best friend and his choirmaster.**

Winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles TimesWinner of the M-Net AwardWinner of The Eugene Marais AwardWinner of the CNA Literary AwardWinner of the Betty Trask AwardA Booker Prize Nominee Set in the bitter twilight of apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, The Smell of Apples is a haunting story narrated by eleven-year-old Marnus Erasmus, who records the social turmoil and racial oppression that are destroying his own land. Using his family as a microcosm of the corroding society at large, Marnus tells a troubling tale of a childhood corrupted, of unexpected sexual defilements, and of an innocence gone astray. **