AustLit

'A Book of Friends is a collection of essays, stories, poems and artworks compiled in honour of J. M. Coetzee on his eightieth birthday. It includes contributions from some of Coetzee's friends and contemporaries, and is edited by Dorothy Driver, his partner over the past four decades.

'Stretching from the Americas to South Africa to Australia, A Book of Friends pays homage to friendship, literature and the work of one of the most extraordinary writers of our time.' (Publication summary)

'Msimang’s memoir, Always Another Country, registers her relocation from South Africa to Australia, but its overall coverage is the series of moves she made, mostly with parents and siblings, from Zambia, where she was born, to Kenya, Canada, and the United States, usually on account of her father’s political activity (as a young man he had been recruited to the armed wing of the African National Congress). These countries, she suggests, have their own varieties of racism, but the memoir also traces the stealthy shifts of power via class and gender in their intersections with race.' (Excerpt)