Earlier this year, my younger brother Herman scrolled past a photograph on the internet. His childhood friend Alan Zondagh had posted it. Alan's wife had taken it. It showed Herman riding a small wave at Big Bay, Blouberg — on the windswept coast of South Africa where the two of us spent every Christmas of our youth, and where Herman had just returned to spend two months walking the beaches of his boyhood. Two years ago he lost his wife. He had gone home to reconnect with what raised him. I saw the photo too. And I started writing. Blouberg, South Africa Roup I'm Julian Roup. I've written eight books but this story isn't really mine. It belongs to three little boys on inflatable Lilos at the end of the 1950s, to the windswept beach that made them, and to my brother — who returned to it this year and found that the water still knew his name. I'm sitting now in his garden in Santa Barbara, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Channel Islands. Pelicans fly past at eye level.…