Kings of the Water
 It is the story of thirty-five-year-old Michiel (Michael) Steyn who returns to the family farm in South Africa for his mother's funeral. This is Steyn's first return to South Africa in fifteen years after leaving in 1987 to escape from a scandal he was involved in while he was an officer in the South African navy. Steyn is from both Afrikaans and English extraction and is now a US citizen. He lives with his partner Kamil Cassis (who is half Palestinian, half Jewish) on the boundary of San Francisco's Castro district. The book engages specifically South African questions of racism, guilt, responsibility and the tentativeness of forgiveness but the novel's ending asks for an international reading, in particular through its foreshadowing of US foreign and domestic policy in the era of George W Bush. Kings of the Water also offers a glimpse at an older version of a marginal character from Embrace as well as allusion to the extended fishing scene from The Smell of Apples, in this way seeming to insist that all three these novels be read and understood in relation to one another.