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Tales Of The Metric System

ISBN 
9781415207239
Format 
Hardback
Recommended Price 
R300.00
Published 
October 2014
About the book: 
From a Natal boarding school in the seventies and Soviet spies in London in the eighties to the 1995 Rugby World Cup and intrigue in the Union Buildings, Tales of the Metric System  shows how ten days spread across four decades send tidal waves through the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans alike.
 
An unforgettable cast of characters includes Ann, who is trying to protect her husband and son in 1970, and Victor, whose search for a missing document in 1973 will change his life forever. Rock guitarist Yash takes his boy to the beach on Boxing Day in 1979 to meet his revolutionary cousin, while Shanti, his granddaughter, loses her cellphone and falls in love twice on a lucky afternoon in 2010.
 
Playwrights, politicians, philosophers, and thieves, all caught in their individual stories, burst from the pages of Imraan Coovadia’s Tales of the Metric System as it measures South Africa’s modern history in its own remarkable units of imagination.
 
Other titles by this author 
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About the Author
Imraan Coovadia is the author of the novels The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves, High Low In-between, The Institute for Taxi Poetry, Tales of the Metric System,  and  A Spy in Time.  He has also published a study of VS Naipaul, as well as a collection of essays,  Transformations,  and has contributed to publications including The New York Times,  the  Los Angeles Review of Books, N+1, The Independent, Threepenny Review, Chimurenga,  and  The Times of India.  He is a winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize, the M-Net Prize, and a South African Literary Award for Non-Fiction. A graduate of Harvard College, he directs the creative writing programme at the University of Cape Town.

Photo credit: Victor Dlamini

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