The Cafe de Move-on Blues: In Search of the New South Africa

By Christopher Hope

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize,2019

'Hope writes with extraordinary exuberance and invention.' - Literary Review

In 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Release date: May 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781786490605

Christopher Hope

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1944 and moved to London in 1975. He is the author of twelve novels including Kruger’s Alp, winner of the Whitbread Novel Award, and the Booker short-listed Serenity House. Hope's non-fiction includes a highly praised volume of autobiography, White Boy Running (1988) and a travel book, Moscow! Moscow! (1990), which won a PEN Award.