Bitter Fruit
Dustjacket synopsis:"The last time Silas Ali encontered the Lieutenant, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the Lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Lydia, his wife. When Silas sees him again, by chance, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering Ali's fragile family life.
"Bitter Fruit is the story of Silas, Mikey and Lydia, a brittle family in a dysfunctional society. By turns harrowing, erotic and fearlessly satiriical, it is a portrait of modern South Africa that also addresses questions of universal significance."
Quotes:
"This is a haunting story of a family distintegrating, wonderfully authentic on its context, gender and generation, its progress like slow dancing." - Barbara Trapido, Independent
"Dangor's vivid prose, narrative fluency and facility for literary experiment make Bitter Fruit a considerable achievement." - Shomit Dutta, Daily Telegraph
"Dangor's South Africa might be bitter, but it is also rich, funny and sensuous. He uses his insider's knowledge to give a picture that is satirical and analytical while still rooted in the personal and retaining its power to move." - Stephen Blanchard, Time Out
"Meticulously written and perfectly paced." - Giles Newington, Irish Times
"The unremitting intensity of Dangor's focus is just as notable as its depth." - Laurence Phelan Independent on Sunday
First Paragraph:
It was inevitable. One day Silas would run into someone from the past, someone who had been in a position of power and had abused it. Someone who had affected his life, not in the vague, rather grand way in which everybody had been affected, as people said, because power corrupts even the best of men, but directly and brutally. Good men had done all kinds of things they could not help doing, because they had been corrupted by all the power someone or something had given them.
'Bullshit,' Silas thought. It's always something or someone else who's responsible, a 'larger scheme of things' that exonerates people from taking responsibility for the things they do.
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