Description
A South African academic returns to her homeland where she tries to connect her past and the present in this novel by the “extraordinary” (Toni Morrison) award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town
In October, acclaimed fiction writer Zoë 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.
Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman).
Author Bio
Zoë Wicomb (1948–2025) was a South African writer living in Glasgow, Scotland, where she was emeritus professor at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author of Still Life, The One That Got Away, and Playing in the Light, all published by The New Press, as well as You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and David’s Story. She was an inaugural winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction.
Praise
Praise for October:
“Wicomb adeptly navigates time, place, and the minds of various characters to illustrate the impact of apartheid on one family.”
—The New Yorker
“The novel provides an insightful look at how ‘memory is bound up with place,’ and at what it means to return home.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Better than any other living writer I know, Wicomb has mastered . . . . ‘free indirect discourse’: the penchant for slipping into subjectivities, letting characters’ interior thoughts seep into the narrating voice.”
—Feminisiting
“A must-read book. . . . Gives us the immigrant experience on a different continent other than ours, and another unique perspective written flawlessly by a writer we should all get caught up on ASAP.”
—Flavorwire
“Zoë Wicomb’s October is a moving family history and an incisive commentary on what it means to belong.”
—Books Live
