David's Story - by Zoë Wicomb (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A new edition of the post-apartheid literary classic by one of South Africa's greatest writers.

South Africa, 1991: Nelson Mandela is freed from prison, the African National Congress is now legal, and a new day dawns in Cape Town. David Dirkse, part of the underground world of activists, spies, and saboteurs in the liberation movement, suddenly finds himself above ground. With "time to think" after the unbanning of the movement, David investigates his family tree, tracing his bloodline to the mixed-race "Coloured" people of South Africa and their antecedents among the indigenous people and early colonial settlers. But as David studies his roots, he soon learns that he's on a hit list. Now caught in a web of surveillance and betrayal, he's forced to rethink his role in the struggle for "nonracial democracy," the loyalty of his "comrades," and his own conceptions of freedom.

Hailed by J. M. Coetzee as "a tremendous achievement," Zoë Wicomb's mesmerizing and multilayered novel delivers a moving examination of the nature of political vision, memory, and truth. This new edition will include updated front matter that celebrates the book's status as a South African classic and honors Wicomb's literary legacy.

Review Quotes

Praise for David's Story

"A kaleidoscopic book." --The New York Times

"For years we have been waiting to see what the literature of post-apartheid South Africa will look like. Now Zoë Wicomb delivers the goods. Witty in tone, sophisticated in technique, eclectic in language, beholden to no one in its politics, David's Story is a tremendous achievement and a huge step in the remaking of the South African novel." --J. M. Coetzee, author of Disgrace

"A delicate, powerful novel, guided by the paradoxes of witnessing the certainties of national liberation and the uncertainties of ground-level hybrid identity, the mysteries of sexual exchange, the austerity of political fiction. Wicomb's book belongs on a shelf with books by Maryse Condé and Yvette Christiansë." --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Praise for Zoë Wicomb

"An extraordinary writer." --Toni Morrison

About the Author

Zoë Wicomb was a South African author and academic who lived in the United Kingdom from the 1970s until her death in 2025. Wicomb was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for her fiction in 2013.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; and Koolaids, as well as the story collection The Perv. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. His most recent awards include the 2019 Dos Passos Prize, the 2021 Lannan Prize for Fiction, the 2022 Pen/Faulkner award and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in March 2025. He divides his time between his bedroom and his living room. He is coediting The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, forthcoming from Penguin Press in 2026, and his new novel, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), was published by Grove in September 2025 and won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Dorothy Driver is a professor of English at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.