It’s the mid-1990s. Yeoville, along with the rest of South
Africa, is in the midst of change. Enter Fig, a copywriter with a penchant for
living on the edge – staying up all night, having casual sex and snorting
cocaine. Drifting from seedy clubs to grotty flats, Fig continues his aimless
odyssey … until the day he falls asleep in a client presentation and is
fired.
Nine months later Fig is hooked on heroin and turns to
drug-dealing for survival. If his previous lifestyle skirted close to the
danger zone, it’s now gloves off as he drops all pretence of respectability and
descends into a world of syndicates and violence. There is no going back, but
Fig doesn’t care.
From now on, he’s living with the safety off – no matter
where it leads him.
At once harrowing and humourous, despairing and cynical, Graeme
Feltham’s stark novel With the Safety Off plumbs the depths of mid-1990s
South Africa, capturing both the exhilaration of freedom and the insecurity
that comes with change.
216 pp
ISBN 978-0-9869982-6-3
Jointly published by Dye Hard Press and altoviolet.
Pricing to be confirmed.
Cover art (provisional): James de Villiers
Graeme Feltham was
born in 1965 and grew up in Uitenhage. He completed a degree in journalism
at Rhodes University and moved to Johannesburg in the late 1980s. In addition
to being a writer, he was an experimental composer and performance artist. His
novella One Hundred Naked Beers was published by Brevitas in 2002. His
work also appeared in literary journals such as New Coin and donga.
Graeme took his own life in December 2017.
