Batis Books is proud to announce the upcoming October 2026 publication of Blot, the debut novel by Rick de Villiers.

Blot centres on the retiring Director of the Department of Dead Letters, the national censorship bureau in an unnamed but familiar country. While the director's replacement seems to have the necessary zeal for the job, he also acts in erratic and unpredictable ways. Is the new man truly suitable to be the 'moral custodian of the nation'? In desperation, the retiring Director begins to write to the only person who might understand his plight – the man who he himself deviously replaced.

What results is what Bongani Kona calls "a love letter to literature from the unlikliest of sources"; a defence of literature's power from a man whose mission is to curtail it.

"De Villiers’s hero comes from a long line of petty bureaucratic tyrants," writes Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, "but his Nabokov-flavoured prose is a joy to read."

Blot will be published simultaneously by Batis in the UK, Ireland and South Africa.

For review copies or extra information, mail us at nick@bat.is, or use our contact form.