Lost and Found in Johannesburg: A Memoir

“Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvellous, and complex account of a self and a city. Does for Johannesburg what Pamuk did for Istanbul. Gevisser is as intimate and sophisticated a guide as one would wish for to this great, troubled metropolis.”

- Teju Cole, author of Open City

Published in 2012, this is Mark’s most personal book - a meditation on place and sexuality, home and identity and, as Emma Brockes puts it in her Guardian review, “a love letter” to his native Johannesburg. 

With the maps and photographs he has collected over two decades, Mark Gevisser plots his path across the city of his birth, from his early exploration of his gay identity to his brutal experience, as an adult, of an armed home invasion. He tracks back along his Jewish immigrant family's routes to South Africa, from Vilnius, Dublin and Jerusalem, before immersing himself in 21st Century Johannesburg.

As a boy growing up in apartheid Johannesburg, Mark would play ‘Dispatcher’, a game that involved sending imaginary couriers on routes mapped out from Holmden's Register of Johannesburg. As the phantom fleet made its way across the troubled city's atomized geographies, so too did the young dispatcher begin to figure out his own place in the world.

In a style that balances gripping storytelling with deep lyricism and boundary-breaking pastiche, Gevisser finds himself, loses himself, and finds himself again in the city of his birth.

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