Zoe Wicomb's complex and deeply evocative You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town is among the most distinguished works of recent South African women's fiction. It is also among the only works of fiction that explored, in the nineteen-eighties already, the experience of coloured people in apartheid-era South Africa.
In a timeless narrative constructed of vivid episodes that span almost thirty years in the protagonist's life, it details Frieda Shenton's coming of age as a woman, and as a writer. It is only as Frieda finds the courage to tell her 'terrible stories' - working through her tangled feelings for her family, her heritage, her country and her art - that she can at last begin to create her own place in a world where she has always felt herself an exile.
