The House Next Door to Africa, by Denis Hirson (Used)

The House Next Door to Africa is among the outstanding new creative writing published directly into the Africasouth Paperback series.

Here is a kaleidoscope vision of a childhood and youth in Johannesburg during the 1950s and '60s, an idiosyncratic South African autobiography like no other before it, related in fragments of distilled, ebullient prose - sharply perceptive and lyrical, affectionate, and downright funny.

The book begins with a weird collection of great-grand-mothers, great-uncles and aunts, who left Tsarist Russia early in the century for Palestine. It ends poignantly with the young narrator and his family preparing for a second exile after the release and deportation of his father, a political prisoner during much of the period described.

Condition: fair (edges of spine and cover are slightly worn)