With tremendous imaginative and political daring, South African novelist Mike Nicol offers a luminous parable of his country's past. Bawdy and terrifying, fantastical yet eerily familiar This Day And Age recounts the realisation of a prophecy told to a newly elected president on the eve of his inauguration. After years of harmony and plenty will come a time of plague and famine, and a strange man-child with a Bible chained to his wrist and an army of the disenfranchised in his thrall will gather strength in the most remote reaches of the land. As these events unfold, they offer a searing portrait of what happens when the preachings of a bloodthirsty messiah are legitimised by centuries of imperialist oppression - a struggle brought urgently to life in this extraordinary work of passion and power.
Also available in French from Editions du Seuil
This Day and Age is a stylistic and narrative success and an important achievement not only in South African literature, but also as a modernist tract’ – London Magazine