Overview
"Sitting there in the midst of them, I glow . . . I am like a sun; a teenage sun around which they revolve, learn, aspire, grow red with envy. Me. Burning bright. Unstoppable."
Danny Rothbart is a good looking, bright, popular teenager in a Jewish community in South Africa in this dark coming-of-age novel. His only problem is a single gloomy secret: he is deeply ashamed of the trouble he is having losing his virginity. Unable to talk with his conservative parents, he turns for advice to his charismatic uncle Harold. Unfortunately, his Uncle is revealed to be a serial child molester who draws a vulnerable Danny into a manipulative and abusive relationship.
Barry Levy's dark poignant debut novel powerfully recreates a showy world of terrible secrets and the confusion that accompany a teenager being drawn into an abusive relationship.
Filled with humour and pathos, Burning Bright sets alight the drabness of the Yeoville of the 1970s - a novel as poetically honest as it is universally relevant.