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Book Salon
Playing in the Light

  • This month we're reading Playing in the Light by Zoe Wicomb. Our faculty host is Saikat Majumdar.

    Listen to an interview with our Book Salon host.

    "Based in post-apartheid South Africa, Zoe Wicomb's novel Playing in the Light raises some of the most urgent questions about the relationship between historical contingency and individual freedom that are essential not only to the art of fiction but to our very lives, from the minutiae of the everyday to the grand sweep of millennia."

    Saikat Majumdar, assistant professor of English

About this quarter's book selection

Marion Campbell, a comfortable Afrikaner living in newly post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa, discovers a secret her family has been hiding for decades in Zoe Wicomb’s enchanting novel, Playing in the Light. Fresh off hiring her first black employee, Marion, usually not preoccupied with national politics, becomes entrenched in the happenings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings after a photo in a newspaper triggers a lost childhood memory. What she knows about herself and her family’s past all comes into question as she is forced to uncover the lies all too often told by families seeking to avoid the hardships of apartheid.

Written in unembellished prose, Playing in the Light beautifully portrays the historical realities of post-apartheid South Africa in the midst of an intriguing fictive tale.

Zoe Wicomb returned to her home country of South Africa in 1991 after 20 years of voluntary exile. She is the author of two other novels, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town and David’s Story. 

The Stanford Book Salon [Seriously Unstuffy]