The Café de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa – Christopher Hope

17th May 2018

The Café de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa – Christopher Hope

Christopher Hope

In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored what it looked and felt like to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'. Now comes Cafe de Move-on Blues, Hope's contemplation of the situation white South Africans find themselves in today, post-Apartheid.

Emigration is accelerating at a rate never seen before, diasporas are spreading from Winnipeg to Wimbledon, and the spectre of neighbouring Zimbabwe looms large as violence spreads. As one by one, the old imperial idols, from Cecil Rhodes to Paul Kruger, are pulled from their pedestals, Hope ponders the question: 'Who is next?'

In this intimate and powerful portrait of race, politics and people in South Africa today, Hope, yet again, uses his mesmerising prose to get to the heart of the issue, and to reveal what can be done to stem the flow of whites leaving the rainbow nation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, My Mother’s Lovers and Shooting Angels, published by Atlantic Books in 2012 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running (1988).

The Café de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa is published by Penguin Random House South Africa