Synopses & Reviews
I WAS ENTHRALLED by [Tony Eprile's] gorgeous prose, his genius for transforming pain into art, and not least, by the fiercely comic gift of his unforgettable, and unforgetting, narrator, writes Margot Livesey about this long-awaited first novel. Eprile fuses a searing political and cultural satire with a haunting coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past with striking clarity. Paul Sweetbread--cursed with a perfect memory in a country where amnesia is endemic--reflects on his traumatic past: a doting mother plucked from a Chekhov play, authoritarian schoolteachers who spouted the government's version of history, and the violence lurking beneath the civilized Jewish world of Johannesburg in the twilight of apartheid. As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion. Sweetbread, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with astonishing results.
Synopsis
In this humane yet savagely witty portrait of apartheid South Africa in its waning years, Tony Eprile renders his homeland's turbulent past with striking clarity. declared Eprile's "horrifying yet heartrendingly beautiful" prose to be "comparable to his fellow authors of Apartheid Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer." As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion, the protagonist, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee with astonishing results. Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee calls "a story of coming to maturity in South Africa in the bad old days. Always warm-hearted, sometimes comic, ultimately damning." Reading group guide included.
Synopsis
"Throws all its chips in the air like a dazzling Nabokovian trick."--Daphne Merkin,
About the Author
Tony Eprileis the author of Temporary Sojourner & Other South African Stories, a New York TimesNotable Book of the Year. He grew up in South Africa and lives in Bennington, Vermont.