A State of Fear, by Menan du Plessis (used)

Second-hand copy — condition: fair.

This first novel by an excitingly articulate new writer is the first previously unpublished work to appear originally in Africasouth Paperbacks.
The setting is Cape Town in the stormy winter of 1980, a time of open unrest - the bus boycott, the meat boy-cott, the boycotting of classes at black and so-called Coloured' schools. The novel consists of the deliberately subjective narrative of Anna Rossouw, a young white teacher at a Coloured high school, who shelters two of her pupils when they arrive on her doorstep. They are en-giged in some kind of political resistance, though Anna never quite knows what: from one night-mission Wilson does not return; Felicia moves out soon afterwards.
Anna's concern for them is central to her attempts to understand herself within the disturbed society of which she is part and yet not part, as is her reconstruction of her own childhood and family relationships. People and places are vividly portrayed in the real and imaginary events of this probing, sensitive story.

David Philip, 1983. 190 pages.