Bøker av Christopher Hope

In the run up to the 1987 election Christopher Hope returned to his native South Africa after a twelve-year absence. The nature of that year's whites-only election and the bitter defeat of the liberals led him to write this satirical, evocative portrait of what it looked and felt like growing up in a country gripped by an absurd, racist insanity.Full of exquisite and despairing descriptions, Hope weaves together journalistic commentary and his own personal story as he encounters the bloody battles that have divided his homeland. This is a mordantly witty account of escape, displacement and disillusionment, and a modern classic of journalistic memoir.

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019'Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention.' - Literary ReviewIn White Boy Running, Christopher Hope explored how it felt and looked to grow up in a country gripped by an 'absurd, racist insanity'.In The Cafe de Move-on Blues, on a road trip thirty years later, Christopher goes in search of today's South Africa; post-apartheid, but also post the dashed hopes and dreams of Mandela, of a future when race and colour would not count. He finds a country still in the grip of a ruling party intent only on caring for itself, to the exclusion of all others; a country where racial divides are deeper than ever. As the old imperial idols of Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger are literally pulled from their pedestals in a mass yearning to destroy the past, Hope ponders the question:What next?Framed as a travelogue, this is a darkly comic, powerful and moving portrait of South Africa - an elegy to a living nation, which is still mad and absurd.

From one of South Africa's finest novelists comes a glittering and vivid fable of politics and power

A brilliant examination of Robert Mugabe dictatorship and the nature of modern tyranny, written by an award winning novelist and journalist.Christopher Hope met his first dictator when he was 6 years old. Dr Henrik Verwoerd was a neighbour of the Hope family and went on to become the architect of apartheid. He was the first, but not the last. In this remarkable book, Christopher Hope searches out the unmistakable 'perfume' that marks out a tyrant, a tyrant like Robert Mugabe. Hope though the days of Verwoerd were gone until Robert Mugabe began to mimic the old Doctor. Hope dissects the person and presumption of Mugabe, the mixture of terror and comedy that makes up his dictatorship. Furthermore Perfume of a Tyrant describes the nature of modern tyranny, its wild paranoia, its murderous conviction of righteousness, its narrow depleted vocabulary and its inability to concede power, however small. Even though modern tyranny is not exclusively Zimbabwean, African or European, in Robert Mugabe is its leading exponent

'A brilliant, compelling novel about innocence and betrayal.' Kate Saunders, The Times

Funny, moving and sharply ironic, My Chocolate Redeemer is a novel full of intellectual fireworks and red-herrings, from the award-winning South African author Christopher Hope.

A political satire and a winner at the 1985 Whitbread Prize for Fiction.