Patrick Lee grew up in South Africa, where he was a journalist and screenwriter. He left South Africa in the 1990s and now lives in the USA with his wife and daughter. Discards, published by Penguin in 2002, was his first novel. Lee wrote the story as a way of dealing with his identity as a South African.
It is set in Port Victoria, a fictional KwaZulu-Natal town that is the thinly-disguised Port St Johns of the early 1980s. Discards centres around Alice who has moved to England. Returning to Port Victoria, the place of her birth, she becomes involved in both a mystery surrounding a dead man and a love affair. Port Victoria is filled with bohemian characters such as the wealthy dagga farmer, a surfer drop-out, an American disc jockey, a former guerrilla turned magistrate, amongst others. There's also Alice's husband, a television producer who was a foreign correspondent in the 1980s. When a naked body is washed up on the rocks in Port Victoria, Mendi Mkhize, the former guerrilla, is sent to investigate.
