CA Davids’s new novel How to Be a Revolutionary is out now from Penguin Random House.

‘CA Davids is one of South Africa’s most innovative writers. In How to Be a Revolutionary she has written a global novel which explores the hopes and disappointments of twentieth-century revolutions in a series of vivid portraits, one of which is a sensitively realised vision of Langston Hughes. How to Be a Revolutionary is a novel that will interest anybody who has found out in his or her personal life how difficult—yet how necessary—it is to try to change the world.’ – Imraan Coovadia, author of A Spy in Time

A reluctant friendship develops between two people in an apartment block in Shanghai. Each has a secret, a hidden past that must not intrude upon the present.

Beth has been dispatched from Johannesburg to South Africa’s diplomatic mission in this vast Chinese metropolis. Newly divorced, childless, and uneasy about her decision to remain in the employ of a regime she distrusts, she is adrift in her own life.
Until she meets Zhao, her upstairs neighbour. Beth has heard him typing late at night, but Zhao insists she must be mistaken. Zhao – older, unmarried, and a former high-ranking Party journalist – becomes Beth’s friend, the one new friend she has allowed her grown-up self to make.

She is not prepared for a disappearance, followed by the arrival, through her mail slot in the middle of the night, of chunks of typewritten manuscript pages.
Woven into the story are Langston Hughes’s fictional letters to a South African writer about the poet’s own mysterious visit to Shanghai; Zhao’s quest to uncover the truth behind his mother’s disappearance during Communist China’s Great Leap Forward; and the story of Beth, a teenager whose decision to join the South African struggle will have far-reaching consequences for the woman she will become.

How to Be a Revolutionary is a bold, daring and poignant exploration of what we owe our countries, ourselves and those we love.

About the author

CA Davids is an author and the publisher of everychild books. Her debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in South Africa and shortlisted for the Edinburgh Book Fest’s First Book Award, the University of Johannesburg Debut Writing Prize, and the SALA First-time Published Author Award, among others.

Categories Fiction International South Africa

Tags CA Davids How to Be a Revolutionary New books New releases Penguin Random House SA