A powerful post-apartheid novel and winner of South Africa's M-Net Literary Award, hailed by J.M. Coetzee as ';a tremendous achievement.' South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With ';time to think' after the unbanning of the movement, David searches his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race ';Coloured' people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. But as David studies his roots, he soon learns that he's on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he's forced to rethink his role in the struggle for ';nonracial democracy,' the loyalty of his ';comrades,' and his own conceptions of freedom. Mesmerizing and multilayered, Wicomb's award-winning novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth. ';A delicate, powerful novel, guided by the paradoxes of witnessing the certainties of national liberation and the uncertainties of ground-level hybrid identity, the mysteries of sexual exchange, the austerity of political fiction. Wicomb's book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Conde and Yvette Christians.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author ofA Critique of Postcolonial Reason