Rachel's Blue

Zakes Mda

Forthcoming

 

5 x 8 inches, 296 pp. February 2016

ISBN : 9780857423320

Rs  750.00 (HB)
$27.50 (HB)
£19.50 (HB)

Buy (HB)

Novelist Zakes Mda has made a name for himself as a key chronicler of the new, post-apartheid South Africa, casting a satirical eye on its claims of political unity, its rising black middle class, and other aspects of its complicated, multiracial society.

In this novel, however, he turns his lens elsewhere: to a college town in Ohio. Here he finds human relations and the battle between the community and the individual no less compelling, or ridiculous. In Athens, Ohio, old high school friends Rachel Boucher and Jason de Klerk reconnect­ and rekindle a relationship that quickly becomes passionate. Initially, all seems well. Not only the couple, but their friends and family, are happy at this unexpected conjunction. But then Rachel meets someone else. Jason’s anger boils over into violence—violence that turns the community on its head, pitting friends and neighbors against one another. And all this happens before Rachel realizes she’s pregnant.

A powerful, piercing satire of contemporary life, love, and society, Rachel’s Blueis a wonderful example of the social novel, surprising us with undeniable revelations about everyday life.

Zakes Mda is a South African novelist, poet and playwright. His novels include Ways of Dying (1995) and The Heart of Redness (2000), which won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in the UK. He is professor of creative writing at Ohio University.

 

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