Overview

Amid the Alien Corn is a vivid, stylishly written memoir that takes its narrator from the bewilderment of childhood and youth towards the unfolding of a mother’s secrets, long suspected from a pervasive sense of something missing at the heart of his family. The book charts the journey from personal and political disorientation in apartheid Cape Town to professional fulfilment in Britain, where the discovery of an identity framed by the author’s commitment to literary study prompts a quest to explore the relationship between the individual and their times. To understand the roots of his mother Ruth’s emotional detachment, the writer pursues the truth about a family entwined within the systems of oppression that devastated the lives of Black Africans and European Jews throughout the 20th century.

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9781836283157

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Dennis Walder is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the Open University. He has published widely on 19th and 20th century literature, including the best-selling Literature in the Modern World. His other books include Dickens and Religion, Athol Fugard and Postcolonial Nostalgias. One of his short stories was runner-up for the V. S. Pritchett Prize. Originally from South Africa he now lives in North London.

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