The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples is a novel by the South African writer Mark Behr. It was his debut, published in Afrikaans as Die Reuk van Appels in 1993 and in English in 1995.

The book describes the Afrikaner mentality of apartheid South Africa as it appears to a boy of eleven. Marnus Erasmus lives with his family in Cape Town in the early 1970s, and his father is an Army general.

What Marnus narrates is what he is able to see and understand of the world he is growing up in, and the novel is built on the distance between that and what the reader can work out from the same events. It appeared in South Africa in both Afrikaans and English in the middle of the 1990s.

The Afrikaans novel was adapted for the stage in 2017 by a theatre company as a solo production, directed by Lara Bye, which toured South African festivals and main theatres and won a number of awards for its performer and its director.