This Day and Age - by Mike Nicol (Paperback)

About the Book

Compared to Faulkner, Grass, Kafka, and Rushdie, after his acclaimed debut The Powers That Be, Nicol now presents a work of tremendous literary and political resonance. His rise foretold by an oracle, a black messiah in the parched South African veld abandons his plague-ridden village to wander the desert, gathering the poor and disenfranchised--only to incur the wrath of the government.

Book Synopsis

With tremendous political daring, South African novelist Mike Nicol offers a luminous parable of his country's past. Bawdy and terrifying, fantastical yet eerily familiar, This Day and Age realizes the prophecy told to a newly elected president on the eve of his inauguration. After years of bountiful harmony will come plague and famine, during which a strange man-child with a Bible chained to his wrist and his army of the disenfranchised will gather strength in the most remote reaches of the land.

"Mike Nicol joins the roster . . . of Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and the magical realists of Latin America."--The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1951, Mike Nicol is the author of several novels, among them Horseman, This Day and Age, and The Powers That Be, and many works of nonfiction, including A Good-Looking Corpse and The Waiting Country. He lives in Muizenberg, South Africa.