These Are Not Gentle People

“Utterly gripping, timely and shocking” PHILIPPE SANDS

“Magnificent and heartbreaking” Washington Post

“Compelling and disturbing . . . quietly devastating” DAMON GALGUT

“This is a book of profound importance . . . A masterpiece” ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

“A vintage crime story . . . an extraordinary tale . . . It is written as a drama, part thriller, part tragedy” ALEC RUSSELL, Financial Times

“A smartly paced true-crime thriller with a vivid cast of characters . . . as tense as it is disturbing” JOHN CARLIN, author of Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation

Two dead men. Forty suspects. The trial that broke a small South African town

“Look what the fucking dogs did to them, someone muttered. No-one mentioned the rope, or the monkey-wrench, or the gun, or the knife, or the stick, or the whip, or the blood-stained boots. In fact, no-one said much at all. It seemed simpler that way. There was no sense in pointing fingers.'”

At dusk, on a warm evening in 2016, a group of forty men gathered in the corner of a dusty field on a farm outside Parys in the Free State. Some were in fury. Others treated the whole thing as a joke – a game. The events of the next two hours would come to haunt them all. They would rip families apart, prompt suicide attempts, breakdowns, divorce, bankruptcy, threats of violent revenge and acts of unforgivable treachery.

These Are Not Gentle People is the story of that night, and of what happened next. It’s a courtroom drama, a profound exploration of collective guilt and individual justice, and a fast-paced literary thriller.

Award-winning foreign correspondent and author Andrew Harding traces the impact of one moment of collective barbarism on a fragile community – exploding lies, cover-ups, political meddling and betrayals, and revealing the inner lives of those involved with extraordinary clarity.

The book is also a mesmerising examination of a small town trying to cope with a trauma that threatens to tear it in two – as such, it is as much a journey into the heart of modern South Africa as it is a gripping tale of crime, punishment and redemption.

When a whole community is on trial, who pays the price?