The NovelPolish Classic style — and three others.

The wind came off Table Bay in long, salt-heavy gusts that made the corrugated roofs of the harbour sheds sing like struck tin. Billy would remember that sound for the rest of his life, though he was barely five years old when he first became aware of it — the way it threaded through the streets of Cape Town, carrying with it the smell of rope and fish and engine grease.

He stood at the window of his father's bicycle shop on Long Street, pressing his nose against the glass until it fogged with his breath. Outside, the world moved in its usual patterns: men in wide-brimmed hats striding toward the harbour, women with baskets balanced on their hips, a cart horse stamping impatiently at the kerb.

I have been writing this book for thirty-one years, though I only sat down to it last spring. Every sentence I have ever spoken to my daughter was a rehearsal for a paragraph I did not yet know how to shape.

It is easier to write about a house than about the people who lived in it. I will do both, and badly, and hope you forgive me.