In Peter-Adrian Altini’s debut novel Salt Water Pool Boy (Karavan Press), which has been longlisted for the 2026 Sunday Times Literary Award in Fiction, we meet Damon in Cape Town where he’s put his personal ambitions and life on hold to care for his terminally ill mother. But when he meets Nico at the Sea Point Pavilion, Damon’s repressed sexuality awakens; and with it arises the possibility of a life full of love, heartbreak, sex, and art. Drawing on the author’s own life, Altini’s autofiction takes Damon from Cape Town to Rome to Paris, exploring in sensual detail how the impacts of loss and love evolve constantly throughout life. And how without understanding them, there can be no inner peace.
David Lewis: This novel covers a number of subjects: mourning; queerness; immigration; self-acceptance; and relationships with family, friends, and lovers. With so many different objectives and ambitions packed into one novel, I was wondering about the initial impulse that got you writing what became Salt Water Pool Boy.
Peter-Adrian Altini: I’ve had the idea for the book for twenty years. I was living in Rome at the time, and I remember going off to teach at a school at 8am stuffed into a crowded bus and having to travel to the other side of the city. And I was missing South Africa, missing what I’d left, and especially the Sea Point Pavilion and the beaches and nature above all. I was on a crowded bus on a traffic-ridden highway. And then I got this idea. I didn’t know that it would turn out to be the novel that it was. But the character Nico was drawn from my own experience. There was someone that used to frequent the pool who I was kind of obsessed with but never had the courage to approach. I thought what if I had had that courage, what would that have meant? The idea stayed with me and, twenty years later, I decided enough is enough. I’d spent ten years in Paris. I came to Paris to be a writer, and I hadn’t written a single word with teaching and a mortgage to pay. But then I decided, okay, I’m going to write this book with that idea. Very quickly it became about my mom and the experience I was having at the time I was living in Cape Town. So, yeah, a twenty-year gestation period of a single idea that never left me and which I wanted to revisit.
The mother has an important place in the book, starting with a powerful first chapter focused on Damon and her. His love for his mother and the trauma following her death return throughout the novel. So where does grieving fit in this story which initially started out with a desire to start cruising?
The first chapter in the book brings us immediately into the world of caregiving and Damon looking after his sick mother. That was, in an earlier draft, chapter three. And the first chapter was the pool chapter, because that was where I thought my story began. But it was only through many, many revisions that I realized: No, actually, the story begins with the sick mother and Damon living a closeted, secret, repressed experience. You see him tethered to his mother and dependent on his environment. That’s what Cape Town was for me. So I couldn’t just write about this hot boy he wanted to cruise at the pool without understanding who that character was at that time in his life. So those pieces fell into place and became a more interesting story to tell. It was only through writing the full book that I realized that his grief is a thread throughout all the sections of the book. And I guess it was because it mirrored my own life experience. Writing the novel, you could say, in a cliché way, was cathartic. But at the same time, when I wrote the Paris section, I was raw with heartache. And I was discovering that the heartbreak was linked to grief, and that pain was the same kind of pain and I hadn’t quite dealt with my mother’s passing yet.
That also ties into another question I had about these different sections. There’s a definite difference in Damon’s expressions of queerness, desire, and sexuality. From Cape Town to Rome to Paris there are three evolutions of Damon. Do these places free him in different ways? How does immigration to these different places affect not only the opening up of his sexuality, but also his understanding of the mourning process for his mother?
The choice of the three cities was to see that character at a certain point in his life and time has passed between these three sections. So, the choice of city and geographical displacement was deliberate because I was wanting to draw on my own lived experience. But at the same time, I was also curious as to what that might mean for this character at this point in his life. In Cape Town there’s an intimacy and rawness in the desire, a lot of tactile bodily sensations and newness because this character was experiencing his sexuality for the first time. The power of that first desire, but at the same time the guilt, the secret and shame attached because he hadn’t come out to his mom. But then when you get to Rome, he’s healing. His mom has passed. It’s been about two years, and he’s raw with grief but his desire is much more exploratory. He’s obsessing over a Roman prostitute, which is what I did, and he’s in a city that’s full of theatricality, Fellini films; It’s a city of history and myth. And I thought this lent itself to his experience in Rome. It’s a moment where he’s lost and trying to navigate his way in the world, but he’s carrying that grief. And then, when we get to Paris, you would think as a mature man in his early forties in a stable twelve-year relationship with the character from the Roman section, but you realize that he is still struggling for intimacy. He has the security of a long-term relationship, but he doesn’t have the intimacy that he’s craving.
In Rome, Paris and Cape Town there are references to art, music, cinema, literature, photography, and opera. How do you see this art working in the novel with your characters? And then how do you see art working in your own writing?
Bringing in cinema was always intentional. Right from the beginning we know that Damon’s a film student, recently graduated, looking for a job. But there are no jobs in Cape Town in this particular domain. And when he meets Nico at the pool, the guy goes through his bag and takes out a book on film editing and they have a little conversation about it. I stole that book from my film school library by the way. But I knew that when he gets to Rome, I was going to use my experience of working on a film set in Namibia. That I was going to transplant it to Cinecittà. I’ve always been obsessed with Cinecittà. The films, the sound stages and the rich history of that place. Then my love for photography in the Paris section came about only because I was writing the book in the library of the tenth arrondissement. And they had every possible photography book you could imagine. It was inspiring to be sitting there. I’d take a walk and grab some books. And then I thought, yes, this could suit this particular character. Also, a lot of this book was written at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, at the library there. And I would often finish early and go watch a film or two. So, cinema was always a part of my experience in these places. Also, when I was living in Rome, I remember thinking, okay, I may never work in cinema, maybe this is not my destiny. But I am fucking living in Rome and I’m taking a bus and if I stare out the bus I see the Colosseum, and if I stare out the other side of the bus I see the most incredible architecture. It felt like I was living every day in my own film and that’s something I wanted Damon to experience. The choice of geographic locations is also linked to this, because when he gets to Paris, there are lots of references to French filmmakers. I’ve always been obsessed with François Truffaut and I would watch these films, copy bits of the dialogue and think maybe I could transplant some of the dialogue into the book. I only did that once towards the end in a scene between Damon and Domenico, which was inspired by a Michelangelo Antonioni film. I thought the scene was really powerful when I watched it and I thought: I could use this. So, the writing of the book in the environments that I was physically in helped.
Damon has one interrupted coming out scene with his mother. How is Damon affected by his attempt to come out to her?
This is drawn from my own experience. Probably a year before my mother died, we got a call that a family friend had passed away in a car accident, in a brutal way. I answered the phone and my mom was looking at me. She didn’t hear the conversation and didn’t know why I was suddenly in tears. Then I put the phone down, turned to her, and—before I could tell her—she asked me: Do you have AIDS? I just thought, Where the hell did this come from? Obviously later, I reflected a bit and thought maybe it was an indication that she knew. It was something we never spoke about. Maybe she wanted me to address it, as you think parents probably do want their children to be ready to voice it, but I’ll never know, obviously.
The conversation moved on. But I just thought that was really strange, so when I was writing the scene, this moment became a part of it. I thought it would show one of the few ways that my mom attempted to address my sexuality.
It’s certainly not wading into the issue carefully. It’s very abrupt, but it almost mirrors the abruptness of Damon’s coming out to his father. Could you talk about what’s going on with Damon at that moment in the novel?
When he comes out to his dad, his dad is on a brief visit to him in Rome. I came out to my dad in the same way. My dad was visiting and we were in Rome, where I was living. I was very proud and excited to show him around. We were sitting outside this restaurant near the Pantheon with a guy playing the accordion and it was tourist perfect. The waiter came over and gave us some Frascati white wine and I thought, this is the moment I’ll tell him. So, I wanted to capture and write about this moment. In reality, I remember our hands were almost touching because the table was small and I thought: I’m going to tell him and then he’s going to reach over and hold my hand.
I told him, but he never reached over to hold my hand. He just acknowledged it and said it was fine. Then I queried and said, But surely you knew you had some suspicion? Nope. No suspicion. Then it was strange because he said to me that his girlfriend’s daughter was a lesbian. Or a gay. Or, I don’t know. I remember thinking: Oh okay. So… great! I think in writing the scene though, it just became more brutal. I started to channel a lot of my anger into what this character was feeling for his father.
To finish off, with what other books in South African literature do you see Salt Water Pool Boy in conversation?
The most obvious example is Damon Galgut. I had the idea for the structure of the book when I read In a Strange Room, which is one of my favorite books. Also, Ivan Vladislavić is an incredible short story writer with a real attention to detail, interiority and place. I admire his work a lot. And Mark Behr, who’s a gay writer who explores masculinity, but also the relationships between mothers and sons and sexuality.
Peter-Adrian Altini is a South African writer based in Paris. His screenplays have been optioned by production companies in the UK, and his short stories have been published in the Fish Anthology (2019), the Iron Horse Literary Review (2021), Storgy Magazine (2021), Fluid: The Freedom to Be (Short.Sharp.Stories) and ADDA Literary Magazine (2023). He was the winner of the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Salt Water Pool Boy, published by Karavan Press, is his debut novel and has been long listed for the 2026 Sunday Times Literary Awards.
David Lewis’s writing has appeared in The Weird Fiction Review, Joyland, Strange Horizons, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ancillary Review of Books, The Ghost Story, Dark Horses and others. His unpublished short story collection, Ten Little Deaths, was a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prose Prize and the George Garrett Fiction Prize. Originally from Oklahoma, he now lives in France with his husband and dog. You can find him and links to his publications at daviddaviddavid.com.