Product Description

Once it seemed to Kathleen Healey that Africa was empty and all of it belonged to her. An aviator, big-game hunter and knitting devotee, who once boxed three rounds with Ernest Hemingway, she would land her plane wherever and whenever she chose. She was free with her favours too, and her multitude of lovers came from all over the continent. But when Kathleen dies, her only son Alexander returns to Johannesburg to carry out her final wishes. But then he meets Cindy September, a woman of the new South Africa, and Alexander must confront the final part of his mother's legacy - his capacity for love. "My Mother's Lovers" is Christopher Hope's most ambitious novel yet. Bitingly funny, outrageously inventive and peopled with a fantastical cast of characters, it shows how the hunger to be loved and to belong affects us all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #280577 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Review
"'My Mother's Lovers is a deceptive kind of masterpiece. It is wonderful on the matter of human belonging and tribal instinct, terrific on the whole subject of the European penetration of Africa, but most impressive of all as a panoramic evocation of the South Africa of our times.' Jan Morris 'Hope has undertaken the imaginative project of outwriting a society that, as it lives out its fantasies, ventures deeper and deeper into the theatre of cruelty, enacting a tangled, horrifying dark comedy.' J.M. Coetzee on White Boy Running"

Another scathingly funny look at the bizarre social and psychological landscape of his native South Africa from Whitbread winner and Booker short-listee Hope (Darkest England, 1996, etc.).The central, towering figure is Kathleen Healey, a pilot and big-game hunter born shortly after World War I who swaggers across Africa with the panache of the colonizing generation that took the continent as its personal playground. She won't even tell her son Alex, the novel's narrator, who his father is. Maintaining idiosyncratic friendships with everyone from an Afrikaner secret policeman to the Rain Queen of the Lebalola people, Kathleen is equally out of place in the race-obsessed South Africa run by religious bigots and in the post-apartheid nation racked by crime and AIDS. She's magnificently clueless about everything except her own pleasures and the people she chooses to love, though her swashbuckling resume of her beloved Johannesburg's past ("We don't have a history, really Just a police record.") nails the wide-open frontier town where her father made his fortune laying dynamite in gold mines. Quiet, uneasy Alex takes a less romantic view of their homeland, seeing it as a place of cruelty and malevolent fantasy, where white people once imagined themselves the lords of the universe and black politicians now play the same corrupt power games as those they displaced. He just wants to get away from it all, selling air-conditioning units all over the Far East, until his mother's death brings him home for a reckoning with her and the "lovers" (not all of them male sexual partners) to whom she's made a few pointed bequests for Alex to execute. Hope paints a broad canvas teeming with vigorous characters; his political commentary is fresh, biting and deeply cynical. The moving final pages show Alex still in thrall to the magic of Africa and his mother, decry their lies and failures though he may. Intelligent, tough-minded and surprisingly tender: a portrait of Africa that both convinces and provokes. (Kirkus Reviews)

Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph
`Extraordinary... Hope is terrific at summoning up the characters
and colours of the times... an excellent, freewheeling novel.'

Elizabeth Lowry, TLS
`Ferocious... a savage dissection and, perversely, a riotous
celebration of the murderous banality of daily life in South Africa.'