<div>A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa&rsquo;s M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as &ldquo;a tremendous achievement.&rdquo; South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With &ldquo;time to think&rdquo; after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race &ldquo;Coloured&rdquo; people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. But as David studies his roots, he soon learns that he&rsquo;s on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he&rsquo;s forced to rethink his role in the struggle for &ldquo;nonracial democracy,&rdquo; the loyalty of his &ldquo;comrades,&rdquo; and his own conceptions of freedom. Mesmerizing and multilayered, Wicomb&rsquo;s award-winning novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth. &ldquo;A delicate, powerful novel, guided by the paradoxes of witnessing the certainties of national liberation and the uncertainties of ground-level hybrid identity, the mysteries of sexual exchange, the austerity of political fiction. Wicomb&rsquo;s book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Cond&eacute; and Yvette Christians&euml;.&rdquo; &mdash;Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason</div>

David's Story

<div>&ldquo;In her ambitious third novel, Wicomb explores South Africa&rsquo;s history through a woman&rsquo;s attempt to answer questions surrounding her past&rdquo; (The New Yorker). Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zo&euml; Wicomb&rsquo;s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, &ldquo;Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory&mdash;denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear&mdash;and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic.&rdquo; Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family&rsquo;s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. &ldquo;Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute,&rdquo; Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion&rsquo;s personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa&rsquo;s bizarre, brutal history (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). &ldquo;Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times &ldquo;Delectable . . . Wicomb&rsquo;s prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean.&rdquo; &mdash;The Christian Science Monitor &ldquo;[A] thoughtful, poetic novel.&rdquo; &mdash;The Times (London)</div>

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Playing in the Light

<div>These short stories from the award-winning South African author &ldquo;combine the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider&rsquo;s intimate warmth&rdquo; (J. M. Coetzee). Zo&euml; Wicomb&rsquo;s debut short story collection, You Can&rsquo;t Get Lost in Cape Town, won critical acclaim across the globe as well as high praise from fellow authors including Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim. Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town, where Wicomb is from, and the Scottish city of Glasgow, where she now lives, this new collection of short stories straddles two worlds. With an array of expertly drawn characters, these twelve tales explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family, and the fraught yet often intimate relations between those who serve and those who are served. Full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight, The One That Got Away showcases this Windham Campbell Award&ndash;winning author at the height of her powers. &ldquo;An extraordinary writer . . . seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters.&rdquo; &mdash;Toni Morrison</div>

The One That Got Away

<div>A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can&rsquo;t Get Lost in Cape Town&mdash;&ldquo;an extraordinary writer&rdquo; (Toni Morrison). Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zo&euml; Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers&mdash;such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others&mdash;and by reviewers as &ldquo;a writer of rare brilliance&rdquo; (The Scotsman). In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.</div>

Zoe Wicomb
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Books By Zoe Wicomb (4 Books)

David's Story

Playing in the Light

The One That Got Away

October

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