Unpresidented

Publisher: Bookstorm

In the irreverent tradition of her best-selling Death by Carbs, Paige Nick rounds up a fresh herd of sacred cows in another hilarious South African satire. But this time it’s Number One who gets the treatment. When ex-president J Muza is released from prison on medical parole for an ingrown toenail, his expectations of a triumphant return to power and admiration are cruelly dashed. His once lavish Homestead is a rotting shell, his remaining wives have ganged up on him, the Guppies have blocked his number, and not even Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe will take his calls any more. And he just can’t seem to get his plans for world domination off the ground. Muza is banking on his memoirs full of fake news to pep up his profile, but his ghostwriter, a disgraced journalist, has problems and a tight deadline of his own. What Muza’s not banking on is a fat bill for outstanding rates on The Homestead, and a 30-day deadline to pay back the money, before the bailiffs arrive to evict him. Is Muza a mastermind, or simply a puppet who fell into the wrong hands? Who is really playing who? What are his remaining wives up to, and will they stay or will they go? And how will he ever pay back the money? Can the ghostwriter make his deadline before he winds up dead? Or are both men destined to be homeless and loathed forever?

Paige Nick is a Sunday Times columnist, award-winning advertising copywriter, and author of the critically acclaimed novels, A Million Miles from Normal (Penguin SA, 2010) and This Way Up (Penguin SA, 2011). She is also one third of Helena S. Paige, together with Sarah Lotz and Helen Moffett, a threesome of authors with a series of choose-your-own-adventure erotic novels, now out in 21 countries. Pens Behaving Badly (Kwela, 2015), a collection of her Sunday Times columns and the wild letters they’ve inspired, came out in early 2015. Paige lives in Cape Town, South Africa where she spends an unhealthy amount of time writing.