The appearance of Zoë Wicomb’s first set of short stories, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, precipitated the founding of a fan club that has come to include the writers Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, Bharati Mukherjee, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, as well as critics at the New York Times, the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Christian Science Monitor. Now, after two novels, Wicomb returns to the genre that first brought her international acclaim. Set mostly in Cape Town and Glasgow, Wicomb’s new collection of short stories straddles dual worlds. An array of characters drawn with extraordinary acuity inhabits a complexly interconnected, twenty-first-century universe. The twelve stories in this collection, most previously unpublished, explore a spectrum of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family ties, and relations with those who serve and are served. Wicomb’s intriguing characters include the adolescent girl Elsie, navigating between her new life in the icy city of Glasgow and her family’s vexed history in South Africa, and Dot and Julie, a pair of friends once united by the color of their skin and now discovering how time and marriage have divided their paths. Wicomb’s fluid, shifting technique questions conventional certainties and makes for exhilarating reading, full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight. Long awaited, The One That Got Away showcases this brilliant, award-winning author at the height of her powers.
Author
Zoë Wicomb attended the University of the Western Cape, and after graduating left South Africa for England in 1970, where she continued her studies at Reading University. She lived in Nottingham and Glasgow and returned to South Africa in 1990, where she taught for three years in the department of English at the University of the Western Cape She gained attention in South Africa and internationally with her first work, a collection of short stories, You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (1987), which takes place during the apartheid era. Her second novel, David's Story (2002), takes place in 1991 toward the close of the apartheid era and uses the ambiguous classification of coloureds to explore racial identity. Playing in the Light, her third novel, released in 2006, covers similar terrain conceptually, though this time set in contemporary South Africa and centering around a white woman who learns that her parents were actually coloured. She published her second collection of short stories, The One That Got Away. The stories, set mainly in Cape Town and Glasgow, explore a range of human relationships: marriage, friendships, family ties or relations with servants. She was a winner of the 2013 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction. Zoe Wicomb resides in Glasgow where she teaches creative writing and post-colonial literature at the University of Strathclyde.
