David's Story (Women Writing Africa Ser.)
Serious and literary fiction, General fiction
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa&’s M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as &“a tremendous achievement.&” 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 &“time to think&” after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race &“Coloured&” 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&’s on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he&’s forced to rethink his role in the struggle for &“nonracial democracy,&” the loyalty of his &“comrades,&” and his own conceptions of freedom. Mesmerizing and multilayered, Wicomb&’s award-winning novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth. &“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&’s book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Condé and Yvette Christiansë.&” —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason