Christopher Hope’s new book, The Cafe de Move-on Blues: A Look at Post-Apartheid South Africa will be published by Atlantic Books in May!

Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944, and 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, and, most recently, Jimfish. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running (1988).

Book information:

In White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an ‘absurd, racist insanity’. Now, in The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Hope goes in search of today’s South Africa; post the evils of apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count.

Hope finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question: what next?

Framed as a travelogue, The Cafe de Move-on Blues is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa – an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Atlantic Books Christopher Hope New books New releases The Cafe de Move-on Blues White Boy Running