Amabookabooka: The Quarantine Chronicles - Marcus Low

Amabookabooka, the literary podcast produced by Jonathan Ancer and Dan Dewes, travels into the heart of the lockdown to bring you quick and quirky interviews with SA's finest authors via everyone's favourite isolation mode of communication, Zoom.

Today’s episode of Amabookabooka is a throwback to 2017 when novelist, journalist and public health activist Marcus Low coughed up the incredible and, as it turns out, very credible dystopian health-horror novel Asylum.

A high-security quarantine facility has been set up in the Karoo for people with a highly infectious lung disease known as “pulmonary nodulosis” - there is no cure. The inmates have been separated from the rest of the country - where they do nothing much but wait to die.

Asylum is like an uncooked onion: raw with layers upon layers and will make you cry. It is a thought-provoking and superbly written book that will do to you what a fictional South African government did to the novel’s protagonist Barry James – hold you captive.