Wilderness of Mirrors

A transfixing, prescient political novel set in a parallel South Africa still reeling from the effects of racial Partition. Exquisitely written, absorbing, and original, Wilderness of Mirrors explores the legacies of colonialism amid social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.

To satisfy his father''s request that he rescue his drifting cousin, Emil-a young Creole from a wealthy background-sets aside his medical studies to move in with his working-class relatives in the unfamiliar city of Stadmutter-the mother city. Among his indifferent kin Emil is first disquieted by days of aimlessness and then diverted by his sexual and intellectual encounters with Bolling, a rich, Haitian-German autodidact with preternatural charisma. Emil begins an ambiguous relationship with Tamsin, a graduate student obsessed with Sigmund Freud''s theories and with her place in a society with shifting cultural hierarchies. Beneath its veneer of indolence, Stadmutter seethes. Through his relationships with Bolling and Tamsin, Emil is pulled into the orbit of Braeem Shaka-the leader of a Creole movement that is threatening the country''s fragile racial progress with its demands for reparations-and ever further from the possibility of a return to his earlier life as a promising neurosurgeon.