Damien Barr is a great author and this debut fiction book is no exception. Wonderfully detailed
And great characters and a very sensitive topic handled in a beautiful way

Unfortunately this one wasn’t for me, however I really appreciate the opportunity to try it. I think that other readers with more of an interest in the premise would enjoy this, I just couldn’t get into it. Thank you for the chance to check it out.

There was some interesting writing, but it didn't feel accurate to South Africa. It felt as if it was making a statement without understanding the context.

Unfortunately I never got around to this book and I am no longer interested in the premise. I am grateful for the opportunity to read and review it and hope other's will find enjoyment in the story. I hope one day I can pick it back up but for now I won't be.

A beautifully written book. Really enjoyed reading this. Thanks to publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to read

The first 100 or so pages were probably the most interesting for me. Set in a refugee camp, we see how Sarah life was through her diary entries. I would have liked more of her story being told.
I felt once part two started I started to lose interest. I struggled to stay focused. The writing felt a little disjointed compared to the first part.
I couldn't connect as easily to the character.
The story is heartbreaking. Especially when you remember this is based on true events.
This is an important and educational story. I wish I could have enjoyed it more.

The long, sticky, destructive tendrils of generational historical wounds

I re-read this book during the present war against Ukraine. It reinforced a truth : Any country which has had, or has, or seeks to expand an empire upon another, does so through brutality. Blood is on their (our) hands

Damian Barr is a British writer, and this is his first novel. Not that it reads like a ‘first’. Nor (as can sometimes be the ‘first’) does it spring from the author’s own lived experience. Barr got that out of the way with his book about his own childhood, Maggie and Me (also well received by critics and readers) almost 10 years ago

You Will be Safe Here, is set in a dual time line, over a hundred years apart, in South Africa. It is a beautifully and meaningfully orchestrated device, where the linking of events from the second Boer War, in the infant twentieth century, to events around a hundred years later, comes together. The narratives are mainly those of White South Africans from the Boer, Afrikaner community.

Both timelines are primarily set in camps, where different groups of people have been placed ‘for safety’, though the safety of the camp residents themselves is not the reason for their imposed presence. Which is, in reality, a brutal incarceration.

The camps of the early twentieth century were created by the British Empire builders, and were concentration camps where Boer women and their children were placed, following the British torching of Boer homesteads as part of Kitchener’s ‘Scorched Earth’ policy

This first story follows Sarah van der Watt. Her husband is part of the resistance and is away fighting the British. Sarah and her young son, Frederick, is forcibly gathered up in a sweep of other women, and taken to the largest internment camp, Bloemfontaine, following the killing of all her livestock and destruction of her homestead and lands, by the British Army.

She secretly (and illegally, according to camp rules) writes a journal of the whole experience. The prospective reader, should she survive, is her husband. Should he also survive, and the two be reunited

The second story is that of Willem Brandt, a ‘difficult’ mid-teens boy, and is set in 2010, or thereabouts, with nods to the 1970s and 1990s, as it follows Willem’s mother’s, and grandmother’s relationships, their personal history, and the history and culture of the country itself, in those times.

Everyone in his family see Willem as difficult, as he was a sensitive and compassionate child, and appears to be a sensitive and compassionate adolescent in a culture believing a man should be different. Willem’s stepfather Jan is the one who instigates the action of sending the boy away to a camp for such ‘difficult’ boys, run by a brutal and somewhat charismatic man, who self-styles himself as ‘the General’ He claims he will instil discipline, and turn boys into men.

Though both stories are ‘fictions’ events are not. The springboard for this book was the real case of a young boy, Raymond Buys, who, like Willem, was sent to one of these sinister ‘toughen up and discipline your difficult boys’ camps, with terrible consequences, in 2011.

The link between both stories comes clear, and does not seem in any way contrived, but subtly shows how the roots of conflicts insidiously reinvent themselves across generations.

This is a beautifully written book, with compelling narratives, clear and layered characters, and deep themes.

The only reason I have withheld a final star, is that I had a slight reservation about the challenges imposed by the choice of intended reader for Sarah’s secret journal. Inevitably, because the reader needed to know certain facts, Sarah was having to give her husband information which would not have needed to be spelt out to him, so sometimes I was made too aware of ‘device’ I would have completely accepted a journal written by Sarah purely as a journal for herself, or as a possible ‘witness’ for unknown readers, should she survive

I had received this book as a digital ARC, gratefully.

Heartbreaking, intriguing and utterly excellent. Such a brilliant story and a must read for everyone. Just excellent !

A fierce, compassionate novel about cruelty and oppression , telling two stories set a hundred years apart., this confirms the narrative skill Damian Barr' brought to his wonderful memoir Maggie and Me. As a novel, it takes risks with the twin timeframes: for much of the book, it's not clear why these particular two stories are being told, apart from their shared geographical setting and their shared focus on man's cruelty to others, but in the end they become satisfactorily and powerfully linked. The first story is about Sarah, the wife of a Boer farmer in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century. Sarah is interned with her young son in a British internment camp, a a place of hypocrisy, cruelty and deprivatiion. Barr does a forensic job of pulling aside the self-satisfied veil from the British political and military authorities, who claimed to be protecting Boer women and children for their own good, all the while treating them appallingly. The second story is a contemporary one, in which a troubled teenager is sent by his worried parents to an apparently very different sort of camp in order to toughen him up. Here, cruelty and disdain are equally as rife as in the internment camp of a hundred years earlier.

Both Sarah's and Willem's stories are emotionally painful, sympathetically and compassionately told without any sentimentalising. Barr finds beauty as well as cruelty, tenderness as well as harshness in the worlds Sarah and Willem have to confront, and this makes the novel an absorbing read.

Apologies for the delay in reading this one! It's extremely well researched, and Damien Barr handles the dual time line really well. For me, the standout character was Willem, and Barr gives an vivid depiction of a lonely boy in bleak circumstances.

An interesting and important story that dramatises parts of South Africa's troubled history through multiple generations of a Boer/Afrikaaner family. The first part is the strongest for me as a wife whose husband is fighting the British in the Second Boer War is placed in a British concentration camp with her young son.

Well-written and thoroughly researched, this is a moving and elegant story.

I almost didn’t start this novel. I read the synopsis and was of the belief it was a dual time-line historical novel. However, when I started reading, I realised that it was based on a true story of the death of a young man at a Military Training Camp in South Africa.

I am the mother of a teenager who did not fit in at school. The understanding that this could be my son’s story made it difficult to read. But I am glad I did.

Like the story it’s a tough powerful novel and I struggled to keep going with it at times, but I am glad I did.
Thank you to the Publisher and the Netgalley for an advance ARC in return for an honest review. I am just sorry that it took me so long to get around to reading.

I started this book with an open mind and wow it was so much better than I had expected!

This is one of those beautiful books that you never want to end, but at the same time just can't stop reading. It covered two different timelines that linked and came together at the end for a magical ending. I did not know much about this time in South African history so it was a real learning for me.

Highly recommended.

Having read and enjoyed Maggie and Me (and seen Damian Barr at Huddersfield Literature Festival) I was keen to read his first novel. It did not disappoint. A rich world, evoked by wonderful language, this is a book that stays with you.

Very powerful. I wasn't sure it would be for me when I read it...some time ago now, but it drew me in and I became hooked. A very difficult read at times but a novel that should be read.

A devastating indictment of the military style training camps for young men in South Africa, a legacy of the Boer conflict. Also a powerful depiction of the "scorched earth' policies devised by the British which led to thousands of Boer people being forced out of their homes into concentration camps. Two stories, a hundred years apart, are tragically based on truth. A riveting and moving read.

Such a powerful read. I thought at first that it wasn't going to be for me, but was quickly drawn in. The author takes us from 1901 and the Boer war internment camps in South Africa, to the present day and teenage survival style brutal camps. I'm not sure which was worse. I was with Sarah and her family in 1901 and felt her pain. I did wonder what the connection between the two parallel stories was going to be, and when I discovered the truth it did make me gasp. A powerful and gripping piece of writing. And a moment to pause and think about the world we live in. #netgalley #youwillbesafehere

Title – You Will Be Safe Here

Author – Damian Barr

Genre – Historical Fiction

It’s been quite a while since I have posted something and I’m really glad that you guys stuck around being this supportive. One of the books that I had read last month was You Will be Safe Here and apparently it was quite apt since June was relatively a huge month when we witnessed Pride Month as well as Black Lives Matter in lieu of the murder of George Floyd.

The book is set in two different timelines within a century and shows how the lives were interconnected with one another. Inspired by real events, the first time line is during the second Boer War where Sarah and her son were forced from her home and had been kept in the concentration camp. The second story is of Willem who was sent to this so called ‘conversion’ camp which proudly stated that they make men out of boys. The entire book revolves around the struggles during the two events and how the book sends out a powerful message by the time you finish the same.

I was pretty much looking forward to get this book for a long time and I was really glad when I was approved for a ecopy by Net Galley during my quarantine days. The entire set of characters makes a huge impression on the readers at times shocking you out of your wits. After I finished the book, I did try to make an effort on reading about the second Boer War and we could see how the powerful have tried to swing the same in their favor.

I would recommend everyone to pick up this book since this is one book that I would not ask you to miss. It’s engrossing, it’s sentimental and it does deliver on the promise of being a book that would make you think about the struggles of the underprivileged. A must read for everyone out there.

My Ratings – 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 (4.5 out of 5 stars)

A couple of years ago, reading about the Boer Wars, I found out that the British used some of the first concentration camps during this time, locking up the families of Boer fighters and their domestic workers so they didn't help them. But the British hadn't thought how they would keep all these alive when no one was working the land and all of the food they had was intended for their own troops, so the Afrikaner slowly and painfully died of hunger.

When I heard there was a book that talked about this, and also about a conversion camp, mixing two timelines, I was instantly captivated. So when I saw it pop up in NetGalley, I didn't hesitate and I requested it. Unfortunately, when I tried to read it, I was unable to: the formatting is just bad. I know some publishers send perfectly well formatted ARCs and others not, but until now, even those that weren't great were annoying but readable. This (and another book by a different publisher) were not the case. The words are jumbled up, there's random line breaks, there are strange numbers splitting paragraphs, etc.

It is incredibly disappointing, but I'm afraid I will have to wait until it comes out and see if my library wants to buy it so I can read it.

This book was very powerful and I really appreciated being able to read about an aspect of history that I didn't know much about. I had read that Britain had rounded up and imprisoned Boer families during the brutal Boer war but had no idea the camps were so awful. I found the diaries of The Boer farmer wife very moving, they had so little to start with and even less in the camps. The second story which eventaully connects with the earlier story is set around the time of Mandela becoming president of South Africa and the next few decades as Afrikaaners try to make sense of the new order. A prospective right wing stepfather sends the "moffie" son of his fiancee to a training camp which turns out to have many parallels with the British camps in the Boer war. I wasn't always sure that the two stories fitted together that well, despite some links becoming apparaent as the narrative came to a conclusion, but the writing flowed and I wanted to keep reading on to find what the outcome would be for the two protagonists. Good read.