Description
A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison).
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, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (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.
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
One of Flavorwire’s 10 Must-Read Books for March 2014
“Wicomb (Playing in the Light) contemplates the meaning of family, the limits of forgiveness, and the deep responsibilities of having children. [October] provides an insightful look at how ‘memory is bound up with place,’ and at what it means to return home.”
—Publishers Weekly
Praise for Zoë Wicomb:
“An extraordinary writer. Zoe Wicomb has mined pure gold from that place [South Africa]—seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters.”
—Toni Morrison
“Wicomb deserves a wide American audience, on a par with Nadine Gordimer.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography.”
—Bharati Mukherjee, The New York Times
Praise for Playing in the Light
:
“Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world. . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide.”
—The New York Times
“Delectable. . . . Wicomb’s prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“[A] thoughtful, poetic novel.”
—The Times (London)
“Deep and subtle. . . . This tight, dense novel gives complex history a human face.”
—Kirkus
Praise for The One That Got Away
:
“Combine[s] the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider’s intimate warmth.”
—J.M. Coetzee
