Mating Birds - Softcover

Lewis Nkosi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0869753177 ISBN 13: 9780869753170

Publisher: Ravan Press, 1997

Synopsis

From a prison cell, an ironic, supremely rational young Black man tells the story of his all-consuming obsession with a white girl with whom he has been silently communicating across a segregated beach

About this title

From the Publisher

Lewis Nkosi is the author of Home and Exile, The Transplanted Heart, and Underground People. He has written for The New York Review of Books.

From Publishers Weekly

"In a few days I am to die," writes the narrator at the start of this novel about a young, black South African man condemned to death for allegedly raping a white woman. He wonders if he would be in the prison cell if he had never spotted the woman sunbathing on the beach. Instead, he muses, he might have gone on to become "the first truly great African writer my country has ever produced." The author, a black who has been banished from his native South Africa, may not yet be a "great" writer, but his words flow smoothly over subject matter that is often painful. As the narrator tells the story of his childhood in a Zulu household, of his first encounter with the white sunbather and of the incident that resulted in the verdict against him, the reader becomes uncomfortably aware of the ugly political and racial ramifications of the situation. Although Nkosi is a talented writer, this work is to be read more for the strength of its message than for the power of its prose. This is a short, but by no means a small, novel.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ravan Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0869753177
• ISBN 13: 9780869753170
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 184