Physics for Poets is a story about a 16-year old boy called Charl, a 'pre-emo' everyteen trying to find himself, despite himself. It is set over 6 months in Durban, South Africa at the end of 1989, during the slow crumble of Apartheid. Much of the content of the book is auto-biographical although the story itself is fiction. Charl and girlfriend Belinda, two middle-class teenagers spend the remainder of their disintegrating relationship, drinking, smoking and groping their way through their long summer holiday. Pensive, rash and ultimately lazy, Charl feels like he has little going for him. When Belinda finally tires of his self-absorbed melancholy and dumps him, it looks like he might just be right. From a school suspension for carving an Anarchy sign outside the assembly hall, staggering through a disaster-inducing relationship with the girl of his dreams and dropping Acid in a club filled with lava, to selling APLA T-shirts and meeting Nelson Mandela after toilet sex, Charl's meandering path cut through the new South Africa seems to have little in common with making choices. All the time the shadow of his father with a secret to tell keeps tugging away at the back of his mind.