Imagine you are in an aeroplane at daybreak. You have just woken up to an announcement by the pilot that the long flight will be over in a few minutes. A city tilts towards you as the plane approaches. You catch a glimpse of street-lamps, cars silently torching the soft grey air, a few yellow windows in the massed darkness of buildings. You are filled with the presence of this place as it stirs from the intimacy of the night.

Now imagine that this is not a city of the present but a city of the past, your past; a place you have not lived in for decades, and which you are returning to as if it continued to be all it had ever been before you left. The lights you see are your own glittering, floating memories, stretching across the years, some of them highly personal, others shared with neighbours, schoolmates, people you might never even have met but who once lived in the same place at the same time as you did.

I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) is a book of reminiscences which are, and could only be, South African in their timbre, scope and feeling. The memories, some personal and some public, will take you on a journey to a time and place that you'll savour long after you have put the book down.

Denis Hirson was born in Cambridge, England, of South African parents in 1951. He lived in South Africa from 1952 until 1973. He studies Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, and has since worked as an actor and English teacher in France.