CHRISTOPHER HOPE

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 years 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.

In the sunny jacaranda-leafed garden of his Johannesburg home, six year old Martin Donally is king of a small and perfect world. It is 1948 and life is full of childish rhymes and his colourful extended family. Theres exuberant Grandpa, who sings and races horses; chain-smoking Auntie Fee, who always sides with the ogres in fairy tales and who makes up her own stories about Martins dead father; and above all, Georgie, the familys Zulu servant and Martins confidant. But this cosy world of certainty ends as Martins tale turns to political and personal tragedy. He cant possibly foresee the defeat of the liberal government that will usher in a new era of bigotry and intolerance, not appreciate the significance of the fact that Dr Verwoerd, architect of apartheid, is a neighbour. And what is he to make of dour, racist Gordon, his mothers husband-to-be, a man who seems determined to shatter the carefree world of the Donallys for good...

It is the early fifties in Badminton, Johannesburg, where all the street-names recall British kings and queens and where retired soldiers relive the desert war in their dusty gardens. This small-town dreamscape erupts with the arrival of Nathan J. Swirsky, a pink volcano with an extravagant moustache; a magical pharmacist who speaks of exotic travels to faraway, forbidden places. In alarm and delight, the children of Badminton observe his unlikely resurrection...

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention. - Literary ReviewIn White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity.In The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Christopher goes in search of todays South Africa; post-apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question:What next? Framed as a travelogue, this is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.

Theodore Blanchaille is searching for the missing millions of the Boer leader Paul Kruger, and his lost city of gold. As a child he had heard tales of Kruger from a wayward priest; what follows is an astonishing journey that takes Blanchaille through a landscape peopled with spies, visionaries, terrorists, traitors, patriots and exiled presidents. From huge transit camps on the veld to a notorious prison block, from a township in the bloody aftermath of pacification to a secret travellers rest for fleeing pilgrims, and from the streets and cellars of Soho to paradise at last on a Swiss mountainside, Krugers Alp is a fantastical political satire of extraordinary invention.

Young Harry Moto has problems with fallen arches, crinkly hair that wont flatten down, a plump chest and, for a white man, unusually dark skin. Harrys appearance provokes mercilessly sarcastic taunting from his school mates but, living in South Africa, it is not surprising that it is his skin colour which eventually brings about his downfall...

Max Montfalcon lay in bed and tried to remember how many people he had killed... Old Max, the genial giant of Serenity House, north Londons Premier Eventide Refuge, might have been left to die in peace. But his son-in-law Albert, an MP with a special interest in the War Crimes Bill, has other ideas. Then Jack arrives. An all-American boy who survives on a diet of video nasties and Chinese takeaways. Max is haunted by dreams of the Holocaust. And the occupants of Serenity House are haunted by Jack...

Bella is a teenage chocolate junkie - fashion-mad and God-haunted - who lives in the lakeside village of La Frisette in France with her aristocratic grandmother. When an exotic black stranger turns up and takes an entire floor in the grandest hotel in her small community, there is considerable dismay amongst the local populace. Worse still; word spreads that the unwelcome guest is a polygamous African tyrant, overthrown in a coup and exiled amid rumours of embezzlement and cannibalism. The question is, why is he interested in no one but Bella?

In the 1980s, a small man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, SA, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. The Sergeant, whose job it is to sort the local people by colour, and thereby determine their fate, peers at the boy, then sticks a pencil into his hair, as one did in those days, waiting to see if it stays there, or falls out before he gives his verdict:Hes very odd, this Jimfish youve hauled in. If hes white he is not the right sort of white. But if hes black, who can say? Well wait before we classify him. Ill give his age as 18, and call him Jimfish. Because hes a real fish out of water, this one is.So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, a South African Everyman, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond the borders of South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the defining moments of the dying days of the twentieth century. Part fable, part fierce commentary on the politics of power, this work is the culmination of a lifetimes writing and thinking, on both the Apartheid regime and the history of the twentieth century, by a writer of enormous originality and range.