White Boy Running - Softcover

Breathtaking to the very end * Guardian on 'My Mother's Lovers' * Exactly the right note of cold, poetic irony * Financial Times * Mocking, angry and beautiful * Washington Post * Marvellously chilling * The Times * Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention. * Literary Review * Ventures deeper and deeper into the theatre of cruelty, enacting a tangled, horrifying dark comedy. * J.M. Coetzee *

In the run up to the 1987 election Christopher Hope returned to his native South Africa after a twelve-year absence. The nature of that year's whites-only election and the bitter defeat of the liberals led him to write this satirical, evocative portrait of what it looked and felt like growing up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity. Full of exquisite and despairing descriptions, Hope weaves together journalistic commentary and his own personal story as he encounters the bloody battles that have divided his homeland. This is a mordantly witty account of escape, displacement and disillusionment, and a modern classic of journalistic memoir.