Tackling a barrage of relations and eccentrics while dealing with the devastation of war and politics, this poignant narrative explores a country's recent history in a pervasive poetic style. This lyrical account of veiled truths and panoramic splendor--where the true nature of change is revealed in a detailed narrative collage--saturates the senses, shifting masterfully through postcolonial identity, spirituality, and African-ness.

From the outset, South Africa's history has been marked by division and conflict along racial and ethnic lines. From 1948 until 1994, this division was formalized in the National Party's policy of apartheid. Because apartheid intruded on every aspect of private and public life, South African literature was preoccupied with the politics of race and social engineering. Since the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990, South Africa has been a new nation-in-the-making, inspired by a nonracial idealism yet beset by poverty and violence. South African writers have responded in various ways to Njabulo Ndebele's call to "rediscover the ordinary." The result has been a kaleidoscope of texts in which evolving cultural forms and modes of identity are rearticulated and explored. An invaluable guide for general readers as well as scholars of African literary history, this comprehensive text celebrates the multiple traditions and exciting future of the South African voice. Although the South African Constitution of 1994 recognizes no fewer than eleven official languages, English has remained the country's literary lingua franca. This book offers a narrative overview of South African literary production in English from 1945 to the postapartheid present. An introduction identifies the most interesting and noteworthy writing from the period. Alphabetical entries provide accurate and objective information on genres and writers. An appendix lists essential authors published before 1945.

Historical Dictionary of Lesotho, Third Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country's politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.

A somewhat regular village girl of exquisite beauty, Ngozi Akachi is haunted by the strange storm that ravages her village on the night of her birth, a story her mother would tell her repeatedly. After suffering various abuses by members of her family, she is sent to Lagos to live with an uncle. Once there she suffers cruelty from her aunt and forges a strange friendship with another girl, Tiffany Okoro, who comes from a different world all together. Embarking on a strange journey that eventually leads to England, she faces many trials until she finds her true voice.

A professor contemplates the ruins of his life while delivering a passionate final lecture; a city girl suffers an unaccountably cruel twist of fate in a stranger's apartment; a rising executive flies blindly toward his past; and, darkly fleeting, a young boy haunts the lives of all who cross his path. It is the district of Suffolk that binds them together, a place so carefully and imaginatively constructed that it evokes the novels of William Faulkner. Through a beautifully crafted mosaic of different voices brought to life in dazzling, original prose, this novel creates a world that breaks new ground in literary convention and leaves a mark long after its poignant end.

Focusing on the epic love affair between a former amateur musician--who happens to be a bootlegger, mercenary, and killer--and a shebeen queen, this South African love story traces the couple's lives and loves through the interweaving of history and memory in the tradition of village storytellers.

South Africa's foremost counter-culture revolutionary shares "letters" to and from his father, God, and the Devil, in this irreverent and pithy book about the world. Serious and philosophical issues of everyday life arise from the naive voice of the protagonist in this off-beat, avant-garde rant. Readers will laugh or cringe at the author's sharp, inquisitorial eye and insatiable curiosity, which serves to remind them that we don't really have a culture at all.

Plunging the reader into a phantasmagoric world where streets are paved with human remains and men are apocalyptically condemned to death by the fire of their loins, these short stories strike a fabulist and magical realism drawn from African traditions and present-day conditions. For all its contemporary relevance, this collection has at its core a dialogue between the living and their ancestors that creates a powerful resonance between the bones of the dead and the echoes of their survivors.

Revolving around a group of students who are caught up in South Africa's political uprising in 1976, this novel focuses on the parallels drawn between apartheid and experiences in Stalinist Greece. It is a moving story of bravery, betrayal, and unrequited love in which the despair and danger of the characters' lives mirror each other. An inspired study in moral uncertainty, it reveals the conflicting nature of political and sexual choices and their unforeseen consequences.

Heartwrenching, poignant, and hilarious, these fascinating recollections of growing up in a suburban South African township during the 1970s reveal, among other things, the failing of the Bantu education system and the harsh realities of Soweto.