Barry Gilder brengt een schat aan ervaring mee uit een leven op het snijvlak van politieke strijd en bestuur. Zijn schrijven duikt in de complexiteit van het post-apartheid landschap, waarbij de echo's van bevrijding en de uitdagingen van natievorming worden onderzocht. Gilder's proza kenmerkt zich door zijn authenticiteit en inzichtelijke analyse, gebaseerd op zijn directe betrokkenheid bij de vrijheidsstrijd van Zuid-Afrika en zijn latere publieke dienst. Zijn verhalen bieden lezers een uniek perspectief op de ingewikkelde processen van maatschappelijke transformatie en de voortdurende zoektocht naar rechtvaardigheid.
From the acclaimed author of The List and Songs and Secrets, At Fire Hour is a sweeping, soulful novel that tells the story of Bhekisizwe Makhatini, a young black South Africa writer, detained and forced into exile, who undergoes a creative writing masters in the UK and military training with the ANC in Angola.
Although conceived and birthed well before the ANC's December 2017 elective conference and the changes of the political and governance guards that ensued, The List imagines a 'New Dawn' for South Africa in the closing years of the second decade of the 21st Century. Rumours have abounded since the early days of South African democracy of a list or lists given to Nelson Mandela and the TRC by old apartheid securocrats of their agents infiltrated into the upper echelons of the ANC during the struggle years. These rumours gained new currency with the death of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela in April 2018 and the revelations of the machinations of apartheid's Stratcom securocrats. The List tells the story of a group of veterans of MK, of ANC intelligence and of the post-apartheid intelligence service, who are formed into a highly secret task team by the newly elected president to investigate the possibility of such remnants of apartheid security threatening to obstruct the radical changes the new president and his team are planning. The List follows these veterans and their nemeses through the struggle years, exile, the MK camps and into the years of democracy and hope, disillusion and hope again. It observes while the struggle veterans painstakingly attempt to pick through the detritus of the old regime in the new, but just as the moment of optimism begins to blossom, the task team uncovers a ghastly betrayal. Is it too late to save the president and the country? The novel is narrated from the future by one of the veterans of the task team from his second exile in a bedsit in London