David's Story

A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa's M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as "e;a tremendous achievement."e; 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 "e;time to think"e; after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race "e;Coloured"e; 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 "e;nonracial democracy,"e; the loyalty of his "e;comrades,"e; 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. "e;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 Conde and Yvette Christianse."e; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason