Upon acquiring US rights, Lee Montgomery of Tin House said:
'We all fell in love with the narrator: his precociousness mixed with innocence. The portrayal of South Africa is also compelling. The country really comes alive in the book's portrait of the social hierarchies and the feel and look of the village where the narrator lives. There are parallels to Andre Aciman's CALL ME BY YOUR NAME: the coming-of-age/gay story, the Proustian attention to the interior life of the narrator, the precociousness of the narrator and the snobbery.'  

And A.L. Kennedy had this to say in her introduction:

'Simon is growing up in Verkeerdespruit, a stifling Free State village of gossip, ice cream floats, church-going, emotional tension and transgression, eccentricity and strange joys. Heyns offers him as a clear-eyed and intelligent observer, a beautifully realised and honestly flawed personality. The adults around Simon exist within the savage fantasy of 1960's apartheid, navigating narrow paths between a multiplicity of visible and unspoken rules: a legion of racial, sexual, religious, emotional and social limitations…THE CHILDREN'S DAY is a deceptively delicate book carefully constructed, both subtly funny and melancholy. It teases apart the layers of memory and winds its young protagonist, deeper and deeper into his short but intense past and the aching dilemmas of his present. But under the novel's surface, Heyns sustains a tangible, steely fury - a real sense of absolute violence, abuse, loss and deep wrong. In Simon's half-spoken relationship with the outcast Fanie we are offered a final sense of dangerous tenderness, potential self-knowledge and painful change. This is an important, lovely and thoughtful book.'

Please click here to read A.L. Kennedy's full review and the extract full extract of THE CHILDREN'S DAY as it appeared in Bookforum.

French rights in the book have been sold to Philippe Rey.

In his native South Africa, Michiel Heyns is published by Jonathan Ball and was shortlisted for the SA Sunday Times Literary Prize 2009, the University of Johannesburg Prize 2009, and the M-Net Literary Award 2009 with his book BODIES POLITIC, centred on the suffragette struggle and the Pankhurst family.

For more information please visit Michiel's website and his BFLA author page.