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	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
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BITTER EDEN

Tatamkhulu Afrika

A haunting novel based on the author's capture in North Africa after the fall of Tobruk, and his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in World War II in Italy and Germany.

A haunting novel based on the author's capture in North Africa after the fall of Tobruk, and his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in World War II in Italy and Germany. As gripping as KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, this frank and beautifully written novel deals with three men who see themselves as 'straight', but must negotiate the emotions that are brought to the surface by the physical closeness of survival in male-only camps. The complex rituals of camp life, the diversion of the POW theatre, the cruelties, but also the strange loyalties and deep bonds they know will never be replicated on civvie street, are compellingly depicted as physical barriers are broken down, and the meaning of love and maleness questioned. A tender, bitter, powerful book, of lives inexorably changed and a war whose ending does not bring peace.

Tatamkhulu Afrika is a celebrated South African writer who died in 2002 at the age of 82. Born in Egypt of Arab/Turkish parents, but brought up by a white South African family, he led a colourful life (including imprisonment for his anti-apartheid activism) and only began writing in earnest in his seventies.
He was the winner of five major South African prizes and an All-Africa Citation. His work was included in the anthology TEN SOUTH AFRICAN POETS (Carcanet), and his poetry has appeared in journals around the world, in English and in translation. Also author of a four-novella volume TIGHTROPE (Mayibuye) and his posthumously published memoir MR CHAMELEON (SA, Jacana).

"Harsh, exquisite and concise. An elegantly crafted work." - The Independent

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Book Published by Arcadia Books

Comments

Presses de la Cité

The highly acclaimed septuagenarian poet has turned his hand to prose and has produced a novel of exceptional quality It is absorbing and beautifully written. Afrika is still the poet, here in freer form in long and elegant sentences, immaculately constructed, sweeping one along.

BITTER EDEN is an extraordinarily powerful novel. With its adjectival yet direct style, a striking blend of masculine and feminine it reads like an epic prose poem - or a kind of deathbed confession. BITTER EDEN reinvents and rescues that thing called the love story from the knowing, arch exile of the last 50 years with a wilful, passionately perverse innocence.' Mark Simpson,

Compassionate and disturbing

Playground

BITTER EDEN, written by a man born of an Arab father and a Turkish mother but brought up by Christian foster parents, is above all a work of sensual disorientation. Describing the looming consummation of Tom's relationship with the boxer Danny, Africa writes that the pool they swim in has a darkness all about as of florists or crypts. It is as if the author were wrestling with the question of whether he should allow the dark side of his early experiences to suppress his natural human optimism. In overcoming the unpromising start to his literary career, Tatamkhulu Africa has provided the answer himself.' -- Michael Peel

Picador

Afrika focuses on aspects of prison camp life that have been little explored. While the novel's theme of repressed desire might have had more power and perhaps a bit of shock value had it been published at the time it was written, it's still notable for its compelling depiction of an individual's struggle to maintain some measure of humanity and tenderness under the most inhuman of conditions.'

Arbeiderspers

A nuanced psychological portrait of the bondsplatonic and sexualmen create for survival . What begins as an unforgettable account of prisoners of war ends as something surprising: a love story.

This eloquent autobiographical novel explores intimacy among male soldiers. BITTER EDEN is a gripping study of the dehumanising effects of war and an empathetic portrait of illicit love.'

Harsh, exquisite and concise. An elegantly crafted work, BITTER EDEN is an astonishing story of men in close quarters forging relationships that border on trust and betrayal and how love, in war, is an ambivalent bond.' -- Kai Easton

"The story behind the story of BITTER EDEN, the gorgeously written posthumous American debut by Tatamkhulu Afrika reads as if the author stepped out of a Roberto Bolano novel. BITTER EDEN is a small masterpiece."