It’s so long since I bought this novel (at what prompt, I wonder?) that it came as a surprise. It’s the second novel of the late South-African born UK resident Zoë Wicomb, and it tells the story of Marion, the daughter of parents classified as ‘Coloured’ in apartheid South Africa, who had ‘passed’ as White since before she was born.
People who did this in South Africa, were called ‘play-whites’, a deceptively light-hearted term but the subterfuge was deadly earnest. People chose to over-ride the arbitrary classifications of the Population Registration Act of 1950 so that they could access the benefits of a racist society, but the personal cost was profound: a traumatic loss of identity; of family, of culture and traditions; and a sense of belonging. And when apartheid South Africa transitioned into the ‘new’ multiracial South Africa, the personal cost also included guilt and shame when secrets kept for decades were revealed.
Marion’s has been an unhappy life, because the strain of living a lie made her parents’ marriage bitter, and Marion — wholly ignorant of her origins — grows up estranged from all her family and anyone who might give the game away. When she finds out, she is blindsided by the impact on her identity, and furious with her father.
Wicomb treads a fine line between depicting Marion’s reality and avoiding opportunities to create her as a sympathetic character. The reader is not meant to like her or feel sorry for her; but she is meant to represent the consequences of opportunistic decisions made in the immediate aftermath of being suddenly classified into rigid racial categories.
The whole thing came about by accident. Not knowing that traffic police was a job reserved for Whites, (because in apartheid’s warped justifications, how could you have a Coloured man telling a White man what to do!) John applied for a job and the man at reception assumed he was White from the colour of his skin. From there it was comparatively easy to transition from poor rural Coloured to lowly-paid White traffic cop. Although his wife Helen chose to have a #MeToo experience with a town councillor in order to get the requisite paperwork. (One of many secrets she kept to herself until her death.)
By the time the story opens, John is just a crusty old man, on the way to dementia. He has no airs and graces, but is immensely proud of his daughter, his little mermaid. The symbolic significance of this is that Marion is neither one thing nor the other, and with her legs metaphorically fused together, she is, for all her charm and elegance, frigid and infertile.
Her mother, Helen, OTOH, is a rigid, pious woman who judges herself as much as she judges others. It is she who insists on estrangement from everyone and on maintaining the white façade at all times, even in the home, where — despite having little money — she apes what she thinks is the English way of life.
When Marion finally finds out, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is at work. The catalyst for her journey of discovery is a newspaper article about the story of Tokkie, the old Coloured woman who was the family servant, but also — unknown to Marion — her grandmother. This comes at the same time as Marion has just hired Brenda, the first Black woman she’s ever employed, to work in her successful travel agency.
It’s interesting to see how the barriers between them teeter but never fully fall.
BEWARE: SPOILERS
Marion goes searching for the skeletons in her family background and to find the family she never had. This part of the novel is infused with her confusion, dismay, shame and bitterness towards her father and mother (now dead). Despite her quixotic dislike of travel, she abandons a faltering relationship with Geoff and on a whim travels to the UK. In Glasgow she meets up with a charming Zulu man, but that comes to nothing because (with sanctions now lifted) he’s too busy negotiating oil deals between Glasgow and South Africa.
She returns to her father who is by now even more pitiful, but Brenda has been looking after him. The story concludes with a party, with John’s sister Elsie and other guests crossing the racial divide. It seems a rather staged ending, but how else could Zicomb have created a hopeful ending?
You can read more about Zoë Wicomb and her role in the post-apartheid literature of South Africa, here.
Author: Zoë Wicomb (1948-2025)
Title: Playing in the Light
Publisher: The New Press, 2006, first published in South Africa by Umuzi, (Random House) 2006
Cover design by Christine Sullivan/CStudio Design
ISBN: 9781595582218, pbk., 218 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Readings $27.99
I read this book at this time for #20Booksof Winter hosted by Annabel.
To see my progress, click here.
Spell the Month in Books is a linkup hosted on 
Masterchef Australia 2026 is coming towards the end of its season, with the finals not far off now. A recent episode made me retrieve our copy of Masterchef at home (2025) to see if they had a recipe for choux pastry, which featured in some inspiring éclairs by contestant Petro. Alas, though it does have some appealing sweets and desserts recipes, it doesn’t have anything made with choux pastry.
Canard à l’orange / duck in orange sauce is a signature dish in any French restaurant and of course the recipe is included in Jean-Christophe’s Simply Novelli cookbook. The idea that a team led by a Michelin Star chef couldn’t make it properly is bizarre. The question is not why didn’t it win, but how could there be criticism that it didn’t taste ‘enough’ of orange?
One of my favourite virtual friends at Goodreads has a very low opinion of John Updike, bracketing him in what she calls The Macho Era along with Roth, Bellow, Kerouac, and Salinger. She recognises that they were writers of their time but she’s lost patience with their misogyny . I knew this before I started reading Rabbit, Run, which is listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and it made me think about why I haven’t (yet) entirely lost patience with American writers whose books feature characters I would despise in real life.
I think the answer is that it’s a window onto a world that my generation has largely escaped. This fiction shows vividly why we have books like Betty Friedan’s 
It’s hard not to conjecture about how this book was received in 1960. In the Author’s Afterword Updike explains how explicit sex scenes were excised from the first US edition, and even more so in the first UK edition. Reading this 1963 restored and rewritten Penguin edition makes me wonder how those early editions sanitised the central character. A reader could not then have grasped how selfish he is, or how he thinks of women as objects for his dominance and his rights over them.
This month’s starter book for #6Degrees hosted by 
Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli 
One of my favourite books of 2025 was The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (2025, 
The thing is, for most of us who curate our exposure to social media, it’s comparatively benign. In Catherine Chidgey’s The Beat of the Pendulum (
But Chidgey has a more nuanced view of social media in her award-winning The Axeman’s Carnival (2022, 
With remarkable acuity, Chidgey’s next novel, however, shows that interpersonal cruelty doesn’t need anonymity to be harmful. The back story in Pet (2023, 
On a lighter note is Duncan Sarkies’ Star Gazers (2025, 
I’ve also read Della Rowley’s Life as Art, the Biographical Writings of Hazel Rowley (2021, 
This year the judges also gave Highly Commended awards, worth $10,000 each, to Monique Rooney, Theodore Ell and Ashleigh Wilson. Monique is writing a biography of Australian/New Zealand writer Ruth Park, Theodore is writing a biography of Australian poet Les Murray, and Ashleigh is writing a biography of Barry Humphries.
I was also peeved by the representation of the Jewish refugee 
Toni Jordan’s Tenderfoot, I thought, would be an enjoyable undemanding novel to read while they monitored my recovery from sedation in hospital. A bit of brain fog after the fancy heart tests, but not like having a real anaesthetic. At the library I’d stumbled on the large print edition too, so I settled down to read it with ease and had read about a quarter of it by the time I was allowed to go home.
It’s a shame that the cover designer of this edition isn’t acknowledged. I don’t know who did the design for the other editions of Tenderfoot, but that poignant painting of a greyhound in the Aurora edition is pitch perfect.
Some books find their way onto my shelves by subterfuge, I am sure of it. I have no idea why I paid full price for this apocalyptic (so-called) literary thriller. The only explanation I can come up with is that the initial premise is interesting, and since I bought it during lockdown, perhaps I was trying to keep my favourite booksellers in business.
I am not a ‘
Eddie and Laura in the novel have always taken their suburban lifestyle for granted and they have no concept of working together as a community because they barely know their neighbours. The 2017 edition doesn’t beat about the bush: the front cover doesn’t ask ‘what would you sacrifice for a drop of water?’ as mine does. It states unequivocally that ‘when all water disappears, Thirst won’t be the only killer.’ It’s not really a surprise when we see how quickly the characters are transformed from their previous selves and violence becomes the normal response.
I thought of Erika Dreifus’s Quiet Americans (2011) 
Individually, each story in this collection captures the dilemmas of ordinary people caught up seismic events and how the forced choices they made haunt them into any new life they are able to make. But collectively, they form a composite novel exploring memory, guilt, and isolation amid others who know nothing about that past because the urge to ‘fit in’ combines with a desire to forget, to suppress memories and to maintain a stoic silence. And although some of these are stories of American Jews who got out of Germany just in time, and the Holocaust they escaped from is unique in human history, there is a universality about the experiences of that refugee generation. I have read many stories of the refugee experience in memoir and in fiction, and all of them involve hellish choices.
When to leave and when to hang on a little bit longer? Who to bring, and who to leave behind? Who to trust and tell, and from whom the plans must be concealed, for their sake or in case of betrayal? What to bring for a journey where what matters at the final destination cannot be known. I am reminded of Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing (2006, 
I bought this so long ago that can’t remember why I wanted it… but I think I read it through a different prism to those who interpreted it as a poignant story about an old woman’s grief. This is a book that will resonate differently, depending on the age of the reader.
I don’t have any religious scruples about Voluntary Assisted Dying or people choosing to end their own lives, but I do think that (unless there’s mental illness which usually waives moral responsibility), very great care ought to be taken to prevent trauma for those left behind to deal with the fallout. Steven Amsterdam’s thoughtful The Easy Way Out (2016, 
Remember that marvellous novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011) which won The Hindu Literary Prize in 2011 and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2012? 
In 2026, Refugee Week began on Sunday June 14th and concludes today with World Refugee Day on June 20. The theme this year is ‘A Million Stories’ and for Australia, it coincides with the arrival of its one millionth refugee since the end of World War II.
Food was scarce or alien, and it was from the 
As you can tell from the title, this anthology of essays that challenge Anzac myth-making is intended to tackle popular (mis)conceptions about our defence forces. The story of the Anzacs is more complex than is commonly supposed, and this really is a very interesting book.
There have been critiques, but Anzac has proved to be profoundly difficult to unsettle. Scholars have shown that some elements of the myth are inaccurate: for example, AIF recruits were mostly from the urban labouring and clerical classes, rather than the rural backgrounds of [Charles] Bean’s legend in the Official History. Analysis of claims about uniquely Australian mateship, courage, fighting capacity and egalitarianism suggests that soldiers of all nationalities mostly ‘rise to the occasion’. Australian soldiers were not the only ones to be resourceful, or to endure appalling conditions or to have hierarchical ranks and status break down in the face of catastrophic casualty rates. Yet year after year we see politicians and schoolchildren on TV repeating these beliefs as if the Australian soldier was unique. And what we fail to see, as James Brown pointed out in Anzac’s Long Shadow (2014, 
But as the book goes on to show with its ‘stories that don’t fit the legend’, the national preoccupation with heroism and sacrifice can bear scrutiny without insulting the memory of the fallen. There are many intriguing essays but the book is due back at the library (and has reserves) so I’m just going to discuss the case of Hugo Throssel VC, an Anzac celebrity who does not fit the stereotype.
My parents always gave us books at Christmas and I was in my teens when my father gave me a set of four books comprising Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and three books by 
Cited in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 edition), Rebecca West’s novel The Birds Fall Down (1966) was her last novel published during her lifetime. Four of these are listed in 1001 Books, each of which (even without considering her nonfiction output such as A Train of Powder (1955, 
The story of the unwitting involvement of eighteen-year-old Laura Rowan in the events leaning up to the Russian Revolution, The Birds Fall Down is part historical novel, part political thriller, and part acute psychological character study. Taking place over only a few days, the novel focuses on Laura’s sudden emergence into the middle of a political conspiracy. West follows with forensic care the delicate modulations in Laura’s response to the discovery that her exiled Russian grandfather is surrounded by spies and double agents who are intent on killing them both. Despite this intense and narrow focus on Laura’ psychological response to trauma, the novel has a vast historical range. (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, 2006 edition, p 582.)
The birds of the title, BTW refer to the two-headed birds on the Russian Coat of Arms which you can see on the cover of my first edition of the novel and 
South Australian Stephen Orr is the author of 
Readers with long memories will remember Giramondo’s 2015 reissue of T G H (Theo) Strehlow’s 1969Journey to Horseshoe Bend. It was a spellbinding book, an account of the epic journey taken by the Lutheran missionary 
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