The One That Got Away
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
These short stories from the award-winning South African author "combine the coolly interrogative gaze of the outsider with an insider's intimate warmth" (J. M. Coetzee).
Zoë Wicomb's debut short story collection, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, won critical acclaim across the globe as well as high praise from fellow authors including Toni Morrison, J. M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim.
Set mostly in the South African city of Cape Town, where Wicomb is from, and the Scottish city of Glasgow, where she now lives, this new collection of short stories straddles two worlds. With an array of expertly drawn characters, these twelve tales explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family, and the fraught yet often intimate relations between those who serve and those who are served.
Full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight, The One That Got Away showcases this Windham Campbell Award–winning author at the height of her powers.
"An extraordinary writer . . . seductive, brilliant, and precious, her talent glitters." —Toni Morrison
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
South African "born Wicomb's second collection subtly portrays the shifting relations among family, friends and servants in a transformed South Africa. Friends and Goffels renders the disruption in the friendship of Dot and Julie, who were once united by their dark skin color but who have been separated by Julie's years abroad and marriage to a white Scotsman. In Mrs Pringle's Bed, Polly Pringle confines herself to the bed that once belonged to her daughter and, with the aid of her uncomprehending housekeeper, manipulates her bewildered husband. In these and other stories, changes in perspective open up what could be very claustrophobic narratives. Wicomb also sets many stories in Glasgow "both the title story and There's the Birth That Never Flew follow a newlywed South African couple on their honeymoon there; in In the Botanic Gardens, Dorothy Brink makes the long journey from South Africa to Glasgow to find her son, who has gone missing. Encompassing a range of voices and attitudes, Wicomb's work impresses, though some of the diction "South African and Glaswegian "and nuances of class and race may elude an American audience.
