Umfaan's Heroes by Jon Elkon

A richly funny and painful story Umfaan's Heroes is a fantasy and a political novel in spite of itself, with a seasoning of Science Fiction with a unique insight into living under the insane madness of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Lovers of Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Sharpe, Ursula Le Guin and Franz Kafka will enjoy this book. Aware of his incarnations in past lives, Tom Bloch, 18-year-old army conscript - South African, white, Jewish - in a prison cell, is condemned to death for terrorism. The novel relates Tom's journey to his cell, how he was befriended by a witch-doctor claiming to be a harvester (of bodies!) from another planet, via his fist fight with his father, his friendship with an Afrikaner boy, experiments with drugs to this gloomy place with the hangman's noose dangling outside. Just as well that Tom has always regarded life as an interlude between deaths for he soon becomes dangerously involved with the Mandela-like figure of Absolom. And madness, death and insane comedy is the only winner….