You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town - (Women Writing Africa) by Zoë Wicomb (Paperback)

About the Book

The South African novel of identity that "deserves a wide audience on a par with Nadine Gordimer."

Book Synopsis

In this searing novel--praised by Toni Morrison as "seductive, brilliant, and precious"--Zoë Wicomb chronicles a woman's lifelong struggle with identity in apartheid-era South Africa.

The daughter of "Coloured" parents in rural South Africa, Frieda Shenton is taught to emulate whites: speak standard English, straighten her hair, and do more than, as her father instructs, "peg out the madam's washing." While a self-conscious and overweight adolescent, Frieda is sent away to be among the first to integrate a prestigious Anglican high school in Cape Town. Here, she discovers a city with racial lines so strictly drawn, it is impossible to step out of one's place.

When Frieda returns to Cape Town after more than a decade in England, she finds herself in the midst of a violently rebelling city--seemingly still without a place for her. Only as Frieda summons the courage to tell her "terrible stories" does she begin to find herself in a world where she has always felt in exile.

In You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zoë Wicomb stakes her claim as one of South Africa's great contemporary writers, illuminating for readers "a bleak but wise perspective on people and on the South African world" (The Wall Street Journal).

Review Quotes

"[Wicomb's] prose is vigorous, textured, lyrical. . . . [She] is a sophisticated storyteller who combines the open-endedness of contemporary fiction with the force of autobiography and the simplicity of family stories." --New York Times Book Review

"Wicomb is a gifted writer, and her compressed narratives work like brilliant splinters in the mind, suggesting a rich rhythm and shape." --Seattle Times

"Wicomb deserves a wide American audience, on par with the fabulous reception her white countrymen Nadie Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee have received. She has a bleak but wise perspective on people and on the South African world." --Wall Street Journal

"A moving and perceptive exploration of pain, change, and selfhood." --The Canberra Times

"Seductive, brilliant, and precious . . . An extraordinary writer." --Toni Morrison, author of Beloved

About the Author

Zoë Wicomb was born in 1948 and raised in Namaqualand, South Africa. After 20 years of voluntary exile, she returned to South Africa in 1991 to teach at the University of the Western Cape. She currently lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. The author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, Wicomb was one of the first recipients of the Windham-Campbell Prizes in 2013.