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6 December 2013.
It is a searing hot day in Johannesburg. Gin has returned to the city of her birth to throw a party for her mother’s eightieth birthday. She is determined, with lists and meals and flower arrangements, to show that she has become a fully capable woman. She knows, deep down, her mother will only ever see a lost cause.
Meanwhile outside, crowds of citizens and the world’s media have gathered to hear the expected announcement: Nelson Mandela has died.
Set across the course of a single momentous day and narrated by a chorus of voices, Fiona Melrose’s second novel is a hymn to an extraordinary city and its people, an ambitious homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and a devastating personal and political manifesto on mothers and daughters, justice and love.
‘Beautifully observed’ Mail on Sunday
‘Woolf produced blooms that are impossible to emulate. Johannesburg provides evidence of a novelist who can grow inimitable flowers herself’ Spectator
It is a searing hot day in Johannesburg. Gin has returned to the city of her birth to throw a party for her mother’s eightieth birthday. She is determined, with lists and meals and flower arrangements, to show that she has become a fully capable woman. She knows, deep down, her mother will only ever see a lost cause.
Meanwhile outside, crowds of citizens and the world’s media have gathered to hear the expected announcement: Nelson Mandela has died.
Set across the course of a single momentous day and narrated by a chorus of voices, Fiona Melrose’s second novel is a hymn to an extraordinary city and its people, an ambitious homage to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and a devastating personal and political manifesto on mothers and daughters, justice and love.
‘Beautifully observed’ Mail on Sunday
‘Woolf produced blooms that are impossible to emulate. Johannesburg provides evidence of a novelist who can grow inimitable flowers herself’ Spectator
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Reviews
With Johannesburg, Melrose enters a widely travelled literary territory and makes it her own. It is a fine novel and Melrose is fast on her way to establishing herself as one of the most fascinating, versatile novelists of our time and place.