Playing In The Light: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Description

Marion Campbell runs a travel agency but hates travelling. In post-apartheid Cape Town, she must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission finds information that brings into question not only her family's past but her identity and place in contemporary South African society.

Reviews

"Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world. . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide."
New York Times

"Delectable. . . . Wicomb's prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean."
Christian Science Monitor

"[A] thoughtful, poetic novel."
The Times (London)

"Deep and subtle. . . . This tight, dense novel gives complex history a human face."
Kirkus

Author Bio

Zo Wicomb was born in South Africa in 1948 and returned in 1991, after twenty years of voluntary exile, to teach at the University of the Western Cape. The author of two previous works of fiction, she currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. She is the winner of a 2013 Windham Campbell Prize.