A RIVETING STORY FROM ONE OF AFRICA'S MOST IMPORTANT WOMAN WRITERS'When Rain Clouds Gather and Maru are fairy tales about the transformations that love can wreak. And they transform love into a force to be thankful for' HELEN OYEYEMIEscaping South Africa and his troubled past, Makehaya crosses the border to Botswana, in the hope of leading a peaceful and purposeful life. In the village of Golema Mmidi, he meets Gilbert, a charismat...

In the village of Motabeng, Botswana - the place of sand - Elizabeth and her son have made their new home, far away from their old life in South Africa. But the past cannot be conveniently left behind at the border. Even though she may be free to reinvent herself in this new country, Elizabeth's mixed racial heritage and urban ways mark her as an outsider. A mind-bending novel that takes the reader in and out of sanity, this semi-autobiographical work tracks Elizabeth's struggle to emerge ...

In Conversation with Bessie Head shows how reading the novels and letters of Botswana's most influential writer, Bessie Head, fosters an ongoing conversation between reader and writer and is in fact a very personal undertaking. Each chapter tackles two parallel threads, the first regarding Mary S. Lederer's own history of reading Head-from her first purchase of Maru, through completing a Ph.D. on Head's trilogy, through living in Botswana and connecting with various aspec...

This book investigates themes of exile and oppression in Southern Africa across Bessie Head’s novels and short fiction.An exile herself, arriving in Botswana as a South African refugee, Bessie Head’s fiction serves as an important example of African exile literature. This book argues that Head’s characters are driven to exile as a result of their socio- political ambivalence while still in South Africa, and that this sense of discomfort follows them to their new lives. Investigatin...

"Critics consider Clarice Lispector the leading female writer in the Brazilian literary canon. Her connections with the nation, however, seem to magically disappear as her work is analysed. This paradox is the starting point for this analysis of the works of an author who - despite being born in the Ukraine - grew up to be an irreplacable presence in Brazilian literature. Non-Brazilian authors, such as the South African Bessie Head and the North American Toni Morrison, provide triggering c...