David Mungo Booi is a descendant of the Bushmen who once lived in the distant African Karoo. Chosen by a conclave of elders, travelling on funds raised by public subscription, sponsored by the Society for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of England, Booi embarks on a mission never before attempted by a civilized man: to explore England as a site suitable for settlement and to assess if the natives are friendly and capable...He sets out to answer ancient questions about...

Bella is a teenage chocolate junkie - fashion-mad and God-haunted - who lives in the lakeside village of La Frisette in France with her aristocratic grandmother. When an exotic black stranger turns up and takes an entire floor in the grandest hotel in her small community, there is considerable dismay amongst the local populace. Worse still; word spreads that the unwelcome guest is a polygamous African tyrant, overthrown in a coup and exiled amid rumours of embezzlement and cannibalism. The...

Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried to remember how many people he had killed...Old Max, the genial giant of Serenity House, north London's 'Premier Eventide Refuge', might have been left to die in peace. But his son-in-law Albert, an MP with a special interest in the War Crimes Bill, has other ideas. Then Jack arrives. An all-American boy who survives on a diet of video nasties and Chinese takeaways. Max is haunted by dreams of the Holocaust. And the occupants of Sere...

Young Harry Moto has problems with fallen arches, crinkly hair that won't flatten down, a plump chest and, for a white man, unusually dark skin. Harry's appearance provokes mercilessly sarcastic taunting from his school mates but, living in South Africa, it is not surprising that it is his skin colour which eventually brings about his downfall...

It is the early fifties in Badminton, Johannesburg, where all the street-names recall British kings and queens and where retired soldiers relive the desert war in their dusty gardens. This small-town dreamscape erupts with the arrival of Nathan J. Swirsky, a pink volcano with an extravagant moustache; a magical pharmacist who speaks of exotic travels to faraway, forbidden places. In alarm and delight, the children of Badminton observe his unlikely resurrection...

In the run up to the 1987 election Christopher Hope returned to his native South Africa after a twelve-year absence. The nature of that year's whites-only election and the bitter defeat of the liberals led him to write this satirical, evocative portrait of what it looked and felt like growing up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity.Full of exquisite and despairing descriptions, Hope weaves together journalistic commentary and his own personal story as he encounters th...

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019'Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention.' - Literary ReviewIn White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'.In The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Christopher goes in search of today's South Africa; post-apartheid, but also post ...

In the 1980s, a small man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, SA, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. The Sergeant, whose job it is to sort the local people by colour, and thereby determine their fate, peers at the boy, then sticks a pencil into his hair, as one did in those days, waiting to see if it stays there, or falls out before he gives his verdict:'He's very odd, this Jimfish you've hauled in. If he's white he is not the right sort of white. But if he...

In the sunny jacaranda-leafed garden of his Johannesburg home, six year old Martin Donally is king of a small and perfect world. It is 1948 and life is full of childish rhymes and his colourful extended family. There's exuberant Grandpa, who sings and races horses; chain-smoking Auntie Fee, who always sides with the ogres in fairy tales and who makes up her own stories about Martin's dead father; and above all, Georgie, the family's Zulu servant and Martin's confidant.But this cosy...

A brilliant examination of Robert Mugabe dictatorship and the nature of modern tyranny, written by an award winning novelist and journalist.Christopher Hope met his first dictator when he was 6 years old. Dr Henrik Verwoerd was a neighbour of the Hope family and went on to become the architect of apartheid. He was the first, but not the last. In this remarkable book, Christopher Hope searches out the unmistakable 'perfume' that marks out a tyrant, a tyrant like Robert Mugabe. Hope though t...

Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents.From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of 'pacification' to a secret tr...

Lorsque Jimfish fait son apparition dans un petit port d'Afrique du Sud, les autorités ont bien du mal à lui assigner une place dans la société en fonction de sa couleur, comme c'est encore la règle en 1984. Pour les uns, il est aussi blanc qu'une toile vierge, pour les autres, sa peau est rose clair ou couleur miel, voire bleue. Ce qui est sûr c'est qu'il n'est pas du « bon » blanc aux yeux du chef de la police qui en profite pour le traiter comme son esclave. Contraint à l'exil après avo...