When Zoë Wicomb burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with the now-classic You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, she was instantly recognized as an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by her literary contemporaries—such as Toni Morrison and J.M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers alike as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman) and a “sophisticated storyteller” (The New York Times). Since then, her carefully textured writing has cemented her reputation among the most distinguished South African writers and earned her one of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction Writing.

Now, with a full heart, Wicomb returns to tell the story of Mercia Murray. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-five years, Mercia returns to her homeland of South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by their alcoholism and secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her own life in South Africa, she recollects the past with a keen sense of irony as she searches for some idea of a home. October brilliantly plumbs the emotional limbo of a woman who is isolated and deracinated. It is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.