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People often seem surprised that Blood Kin isn't set in South Africa, where I was born and grew up (with stints in Australia because of my father's anti-apartheid activities). There does seem to be a tradition of a debut novel (especially by a young author) being quasi-autobiographical, particularly if that author lived through politically tumultuous times in his/her childhood. I started writing Blood Kin when I had just moved back to South Africa after ten years living away from the country, and I remember feeling that the only way I could say anything about the experience of growing up there as a white in the 1980s, in the thick of apartheid, was in the form of a fable, with no cultural markers and no explicit geographical setting.

This form let me explore themes that are particularly South African (guilt, complicity, cycles of power abuse) without being hamstrung by the politics of representation, especially as a young white writer who - despite my parents' opposition to apartheid - was still a beneficiary of that regime, through the free health care and schooling that was provided to all whites.

But I'm not sure that I fully deserve to be described as a "South African author." I've had joint South African and Australian citizenship since I was two. I no longer live in South Africa and I don't know when I will again in the future. My parents live in Sydney; my sister in London. I now belong to the South African diaspora rather than to South Africa.

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I spend a lot of time doing my literacy work over at The Children's Village, a residential school for New York City's foster care children. The boys (over 300 of them) who live at The Village have been through terrible times. Their stories are marked by despair and loneliness, tragedy and isolation.

I discovered many years ago that books open up their trust, their hearts and their minds again, after what has sometimes been years of deprivation. Through some magical children's books, I have heard boys at The Village laugh, sometimes for the first time in a long time. They have wept over Charlotte the spider. They have cheered Harry on in a battle. Stories have released their own power to reclaim their stories, for told through the point of view of a tiny spider, each and every boy at The Village comes to see that he too has a story that matters.

One of the most favorite authors at The Children's Village is Dr. Seuss, even for the oldest boys there. I have often wondered why this is so. I love Dr. Seuss myself, but it has amazed me how intense the relationship is that some of our most wounded children have developed with this legendary author. I think it is because while Dr. Seuss was so bitingly funny, he also never talked down to children. His stories were always extraordinarily respectful of the child's complex experience. The boys at The Village so recognize this. And they love me to read those books to them. Whether a boy is eight or eighteen, his eyes light up when I reach for a Dr. Seuss.

The power of literature can help to recover childhood, not only to develop it, and that is the truth.