Bar­ry Levy is a for­mer jour­nal­ist. His fic­tion includes: Burn­ing Bright, a sto­ry of young love, hate and child abuse in the Jew­ish sub­urbs, set against a back­ground of apartheid South Africa; As If!, a grit­ty and real­is­tic depic­tion of life on the streets for home­less kids; and Shades of Exo­dus, a soul-search­ing por­trait of migrants, par­tic­u­lar­ly Jew­ish South Africans, who have cho­sen new shores.