I Wish, I Wish - Zirk Van Den Berg

As a mortician, Seb has mastered the art of making the dead resemble the living. He’s embalmed countless corpses, unpacked organs, reset bones and made up pallid faces for their final viewing. If he’s honest, he prefers the company of the deceased – no surprises and nobody to witness his inadequacy. But they don’t make for great work stories – nothing for his teenage children to look up to or to attract the waning interest of his wife. It looks like another humdrum day at White Lily Funerals when Seb meets Gabe, a dying boy unusually interested in caskets, who forces the mortician to rearrange the pieces of his life and shows him that magic doesn’t have to be just a wish. A darkly comic tale with a tender heart, I Wish, I Wish was awarded the prestigious WA Hofmeyr Prize for outstanding writing that shifts the boundaries of Afrikaans literature.