A new edition of Achmat Dangor’s acclaimed novel Bitter Fruit is out soon from Picador Africa, ahead of the publication of his new novel, Dikeledi, in August.
The new edition features a wonderful new introduction by author Mandla Langa, and a stunning new cover.
First published in 2001, Bitter Fruit was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award and the Man Booker Prize.
The novel tells the story of a Coloured family in around the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a history of uMkhonto weSizwe and the apartheid security police that come back to haunt them.
Read an excerpt, taken from Chapter 5 of the novel:
NO, SILAS AND Kate had never ‘jolled’, which was a township way of describing an affair, though many people were firm in the belief that they must at least have slept with each other, just once, as an experiment. After all, he was a black man and she was a white woman, and when they had been active in the movement, breaking the racial barrier was like breaking the land-speed record or shooting an AK-47 for the first time. It created the same fleeting excitement, sleeping with someone of another colour.
Alec had once told Silas he found it incredible that he had never tasted a ‘nice piece of silverside’, and that Kate being a ‘double adapter’ must have made it all the more exciting. Silas’s angry response had only reinforced Alec’s suspicion that he was being devious and unnecessarily coy. ‘Shit, everyone knows that white cherries want black ouens because white ouens don’t know how to naai.’
