Johan van Zyl walks out of a Cape Town clinic with a prognosis and a decision: no chemo, no machines, no fluorescent endings. Instead, he buys a few tins, straps an old saddle to a limping gelding, calls a scarred farm dog to his heel, and turns his face to the Karoo-the dry heart of a country that raised him hard and honest.
The road to Malanshoek is a ledger of heat, windpumps, and empty miles. Along the way, Johan meets strangers whose kindness costs them something, buries what he can't carry, and learns to measure time in hooves, breaths, and stars. He keeps a journal, rations the pills, and maps the land the way his father taught him: by thirst, by silence, by where the jackals sing.
The farm that waits at the end of the world isn't a monument. It's a reckoning. Among the Van Zyl graves and the shepherd's tree, Johan names what made and unmade him-rage, pride, inheritance, the soft, stubborn love of animals-and writes the last letter he owes his children. What he finds isn't absolution so much as consent: to forgive what can be forgiven, to release what must be released, and to go still at last.
The Last Ride is a spare, fierce, and unexpectedly tender novel about fathers and sons, the brutal mercy of landscape, and the long walk home every human makes. For readers of Cormac McCarthy, Damon Galgut, and anyone who believes that love, in the end, is simply attention paid all the way to the horizon.
