The Persistence of Memory

"Always warm-hearted, sometimes comic, ultimately damning."J. M. Coetzee "I was enthralled by [Tony Eprile's] gorgeous prose, his genius for transforming pain into art, and not least, by the fiercely comic gift of his unforgettable, and unforgetting, narrator," writes Margot Livesey about this long-awaited first novel. Eprile fuses a searing political and cultural satire with a haunting coming-of-age story to render South Africa's turbulent past with striking clarity. Paul Sweetbreadcursed with a perfect memory in a country where amnesia is endemicreflects on his traumatic past: a doting mother plucked from a Chekhov play, authoritarian schoolteachers who spouted the government's version of history, and the violence lurking beneath the civilized Jewish world of Johannesburg in the twilight of apartheid. As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion, Sweetbread, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with astonishing results.