The Wall

Behold, the gated community The Pines, a gated community in East London, protects homeowners from crime. But nobody's going to protect the young man trapped behind its walls. Moses wants one thing: to get home, where his girlfriend and a cold beer are waiting for him, but his car breaks down on an empty street, not a single human being in sight.

Moses slips into The Pines, a gated community, in hopes to find help from a university classmate who lives there. Over there, in the "white" world, everything seems calm, orderly, safe. But once inside, he feels like more of an outsider than ever. And he makes a terrible mistake.

Mistaken identities, racial profiling, and class politics form the backdrop of this intense thriller. Annas does not shy away from issues like gun violence, racism, and exclusion in contemporary South Africa. Annas is a well-known author in Germany. His debut, The Farm, won the German Crime Fiction Prize in 2014 and is being filmed here in South Africa at present.

The Wall is his second novel. It won the 2017 German Crime Fiction Prize. The book has just been launched in the USA, and now too in South Africa. Rachel Hildebrandt has done the translation. Annas is working on a third book with a working title of The City.