livestream: How To Be A Revolutionary by C.A. Davids
Thursday 10th February
livestream - 7pm - free entry
Register your interest by getting your free ticket for this author talk, instructions to join will be emailed shortly afterwards. For your security and ours, you cannot attend this talk without registering in advance first.
Join C.A. Davids via Zoom to hear about her extraordinary, ambitious, globe-spanning novel - a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.
This novel connects contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising. Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the twenty-first century, has betrayed its early promises. At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai, and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes—who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript—chunk by chunk—appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend…
Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising—and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet’s time in Shanghai—How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel.
C. A. Davids is an author and the publisher of everychild books. Her debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in South Africa and shortlisted for the Edinburgh Book Fest’s First Book Award, the University of Johannesburg Debut Writing Prize, and the SALA First-time Published Author Award, among others.
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