Robert Dewar

I wrote "Mallaig Road" during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 - 2021, as an antidote to anxiety and unhappiness. And a most effective antidote it proved to be. Through the boy-hero, Alexander Maclean, I was able to recall a time in my own life when anxieties were few, and, like unhappiness, were fleeting. I hope the reader too will be transported back in time to a place where anxieties and unhappiness were scarce and fleeting.

The story in "Mallaig Road" (the name of the Cape Town suburban street in which the family home is located), opens in 1965, shortly after Alexander Maclean's tenth birthday, and is set for the most part in Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula. It closes with Alexander's extended visit to the United Kingdom in 1976. He is now twenty-one years old.

Mallaig Road's sequel, "Hemispheres," picks up where "Mallaig Road" leaves off. "Hemispheres" charts the course of Alexander's life through to 2021, by which time he is sixty-six years old. Alexander Maclean has lived a fascinating and at times chaotic life, with repeated journeys between Africa and Britain, and periods spent living in Malta and the Far East.

Both "Mallaig Road" and "Hemispheres" contain some heavily fictionalised autobiographical material. They are, however, primarily works of fiction, and should be read (and I hope, enjoyed) as such.

My third novel, "Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets," is set in British East Africa in the early 1960s, during the last days of European rule. Published in late November 2023, this story is entirely a work of fiction. I very much enjoyed writing the story: it contains high drama, violence, tragedy - and romance - and is set during the final years of a colonial culture and lifestyle located in a region I once knew well.

Societies in a state of collapse, of catastrophic change, have always fascinated me, and "Of Sidearms and Dinner Jackets" charts just such a societal cultural collapse. 

My fourth novel, which is, once again, entirely a work of fiction, is now with my publishers. Titled "Nineteen Seventy-Six", the story is located entirely within Cape Town and the Cape Peninsula, during a period of heightened racial tension and periodic outbreaks of violence in South Africa. The focus of the story is not, however, on political events during 1976, but on the lives of the characters found in a residential hotel far down the Peninsula. Once again, I write about a region with which I was intensely familiar, during a period I remember well. This novel is due to be published in October 2024.

I am currently working (April 2024) on a novel titled "Saint Blaise", in which much of the action takes place (as with "Nineteen Seventy-Six") in Cape Town. In this story, we pick up on the life of Blaise, a Catholic boy then aged thirteen, living in Cape Town, and we look at the events which shaped him, and at how he acquires his eventual reputation as something of a Christian mystic and holy man. The story follows Blaise from Cape Town in the late 1960s, to Angola during the South African Border Wars of the mid-1970s, and then to Rhodesia during the late 1970s during her Bush War, and back to Cape Town. I aim to see this novel published by early 2025. 

My novels are set in the past. Not the distant past (the 1960s and 1970s do not seem so long ago to me), but a past which, in hindsight, seemed to embrace a period before the myriad contemporary "issues" which so bedevil British society,  became important. I do not write about contemporary British society. I do not understand contemporary British society, which seems to share so few of my values - the values which shaped me. I do not write, for example, with the conscious intention of portraying the concerns of the LGBT community; nor do I write from a working class perspective; nor do I focus on exploring life with a disability. Neither am I a black writer. If you are wearied by contemporary British society, and you seek to escape the present once in a while via a good story, you may enjoy reading my books.