ABOUT
THE BOOK

Johannesburg, 1998. Silas Ali, a former political activist, now a middle-aged civil servant working on the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is shopping one Sunday morning when he bumps into a ghost from his past, Lieutenant de Boise, a retired security policeman. This chance encounter brings back a memory that Silas and his wife Lydia have been avoiding for twenty years. The past erupts into the present, cracking off the shell of normality that encloses their family life. This is the story of Silas and Lydia, and especially of their son Mikey, a university student with a curious mind and a calculating will, as their relationships fracture and their lives go off in new and surprising directions. Achmat Dangor deals with the difficult politics of race, with coloured identity, with the lifestyles of the new elite in ways that are refreshingly open and ironical. This novel is equally attuned to the brittle surface of urban life in post-apartheid South Africa and to the deeper, more disturbing historical currents that run beneath it.