A tragic fall in the Karoo in which one of his brothers dies and the otherloses all memory of the day changes the life of young John Hyde irrevocably. In London many years later, the reappearance of his remaining brother disrupts the delicate life John has built, and brings an unsettling recollection of the events that ripped their family apart.Pulled back to South Africa in spite of himself, John returns to the home he grew up in to face a past that haunts him. In language pulled so tightly it sings, Alastair Bruce’s Boy on the Wire is an elegy to our fragile memory and the lives entangled in it.