Max

In the red dust of Namaqualand, a boy finds something that shouldn't exist.

Eleven-year-old Kia Botha is good at two things: reading, and being unnoticed. At a small boarding school in the Northern Cape, he walks the fence line and keeps his head down - until the Saturday he goes through the gap in the fence and finds a broken machine half-buried in the municipal dump. Six legs. A cluster of dark sensors where a face should be. A designation plate that reads, barely legibly: M. A. X.

Kia brings him home and starts, patiently, to repair him.

What he doesn't know yet is that Max is not from anywhere on Earth. He is a geological survey unit from Mars - forty years of silent observation, fourteen thousand dawns, and one small, unexplained habit: pointing his camera slightly higher than his mission required, again and again, for a reason he can't name. As Max wakes and remembers, Kia begins to understand that the machine he rescued has been keeping a record of something - something he encrypted away from himself, and can no longer reach.

Set against the quiver trees and endless skies of Namaqualand, Max is a quiet, lyrical story about attention: the kind you learn from a landscape, and the kind you learn to give another living thing. It is about a boy and his father and a machine that refuses to stop watching the sky, even when it is broken. And it is the first chapter of a larger mystery - one that will eventually carry Kia farther than the red earth of the Northern Cape, all the way to the place Max once stood, and to the question of what was worth protecting for forty years.

The first book in a trilogy. Includes a glossary of South African terms and places.