Barking at Dogs is a memoir disguised as fiction, or fiction trying to confess its way back to the truth. It’s about growing up white in apartheid South Africa, inside the machinery of a system so absurd and cruel that, for years, most people living in it stopped seeing it at all.

The stories move through family mythology, border towns, military roads, dogs, music, the Voortrekker Monument, and all the small daily performances required to survive inside a moral catastrophe. The narrator is funny because South Africa was often ridiculous. He is uneasy because the ridiculousness came with victims. And he spends the book trying to understand what it means to have been both witness and beneficiary before he was old enough to understand the difference.

The book opens with a warning: memory is unreliable. It lies. It edits. It protects itself. Some of these stories happened almost exactly as told. Some have been embellished for narrative survival. And some are, in the author’s own words, “complete bullshit balanced precariously on a thin scaffolding of truth.” That uncertainty is part of the point.

Barking at Dogs is for South Africans who left and still carry the country around in their nervous systems as much as it is for those who stayed. But it’s also for anyone who grew up inside a culture that normalized injustice — and who later had to untangle what they were taught from what was true.