<p>'Cool and intelligent, unsettling and deeply felt, Naudé's voice is something new in South African writing.' – Damon Galgut <br>From an ancient castle in Bavaria and a pre-War villa in Milan, to a winter landscape in <br>Lesotho and the suburban streets of Pretoria, the stories in The Alphabet of Birds take an acute look at South Africans at home and abroad.<br>In one story, a strange, cheerful Japanese man visits a young South African as he takes care of his dying mother; in another, a woman battles corrupt bureaucracy in the Eastern Cape. A man trails his lover through the underground dance clubs of Berlin, while in London a young banker moves through layers of decadence as a soul would through purgatory.<br>Pulsating with passion, loss, and melancholia, S J Naudé's collection The Alphabet of Birds is filled with music, art, architecture, myth, the search for origins and the shifing <br>relationships between people.</p>