He lost everything in the fire. It took a stolen pair of shoes, a fourteen-year-old boy, and one Zulu word to bring it back.

Robert Harrison was a baker, a husband, a father. Ten years after the fire that killed his wife and destroyed his business, he is a white beggar in a Black city — a man Johannesburg walks past without seeing. Sober now, estranged from his daughter, he carries a guilt everyone agrees he deserves.

Sipho Dlamini is fourteen and has already lost his parents, his home, and almost everything else. What he has is a quick mind, his father's instruction to aim high, and a pair of Nike trainers he stole for himself — the first shoes he has owned in months. When the shoes bring violence, Robert steps in — and a wary arrangement between a broken man and an orphaned boy slowly becomes something neither can name and neither can do without.

Then Robert's daughter Julie, a lawyer who has spent ten years refusing to forgive him, opens the file on the fire — and begins to see that the story she has built her life on may be wrong.

Set on the streets of Johannesburg, Sawubona is a novel about grief and guilt, fathers and daughters, the families we lose and the ones we assemble from what's left — and about the Zulu greeting that means, simply, I see you. For readers of Rachel Joyce and Fredrik Backman.

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