Barking at Dogs is a riotous, tender, and oh-so-South African collection of true and true-ish tales from the backrooms of a family shop and the wild edges of late-apartheid South Africa.

These stories move like a pickup truck over corrugations: clattering, hilarious, then suddenly, unexpectedly gentle. There is the delivery room, where a newborn Leon already has opinions about the 1960s he has been born into. There is Warmbaths, and a family road trip that teaches him more about apartheid than any classroom ever could. There is a shaky start at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, now Makhanda, where he meets his best friend Block and falls in with a crowd that rattles cages, forms a racially mixed band, and gets chased, questioned, and rusticated for his trouble. There is a night in Rhini township that could have gone very differently. There is Matjiesfontein, and a ghost story that turns out to be about something else entirely. There are small-town characters, and the kind of dry humour that gets a family through hard times.

Threaded through all of it is the ache and absurdity of a country coming apart at the seams, and the slower, quieter reckoning of a young white South African learning what his comfort actually cost, and who paid for it.

Leon Lazarus writes with the intuitive accuracy of a mechanic and the timing of a comic: memory as spanner, humour as solvent, truth as the one bolt he finally loosens. He does not claim to have stood on the front lines of the struggle against apartheid. By his own account he was somewhere behind the restrooms, three miles back from the line of contact, most of the time. But he was there for enough of it, and he tells it straight, funny side up, without pretending the funny side was the whole story.

If you love great storytelling that leaves grease under your nails and a lump in your throat, you will devour Barking at Dogs.