Bitter Fruit | General Fiction

Achmat Dangor

An audacious novel set in a changing South Africa at the end of the nineties, just as the TRC is finishing its work.

In Bitter Fruit, Dangor ventures into territory no other South African writer in English has approached, and it is his most challenging work yet. In ways that are refreshingly open and ironical, the novel deals with the difficult politics of race, coloured identity, and the lifestyles of the new elite.

Silas Ali, a former political activist, now a middle-aged civil servant working on the final TRC report, is shopping in the Killarney Mall, Johannesburg, when he bumps into a ghost from his past: Lieutenant François du Boise, a retired security policeman. This chance encounter brings back the memory that Silas and his wife, Lydia, have been avoiding for twenty years. The past erupts into the present, cracking the shell of normality that encloses their family life. This is the story of Silas and Lydia, and especially of their son, Mikey – a university student with a curious mind and a calculating will – as their relationships fracture and their lives go off in new and surprising directions.