The Shouting in the Dark - Softcover

Elleke Boehmer is the author of Screens against the Sky (short-listed David Hyam Prize, 1990), Bloodlines (shortlisted SANLAM prize), and Nile Baby (2008), and also the short-story collection Sharmilla and Other Portraits (2010). Her edition of Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys was a 2004 summer bestseller. Her acclaimed biography of Nelson Mandela (2008) has been translated into Arabic, Malaysian, Thai, Kurdish, Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese. She has published several other books including Stories of Women (2005), the anthology Empire Writing (1998), and Indian Arrivals: Networks of British Empire (2015). She is a judge of the Man Booker International Prize 2015.
LOCATION: London

Boehmer creates a microcosm of apartheid South Africa, telling the story of one girl growing up in the shadows of her family's past. ... The descriptions of the landscape are breathtaking, invoking the vastness of the country and the magic of childhood.--Kirkus Reviews

"Boehmer's taut prose propels her narrator through an all-too-believable re-creation of South Africa's troubled past toward a more equitable future."--World Literature Today

'The story, as disturbing as it is enthralling, of a girl's struggle to emerge from under the dead weight of her father's oppression while at the same time searching for a secure footing in the moral chaos of South Africa of the apartheid era.' JM Coetzee

A carefully crafted and riveting read from beginning to end. --The Midwest Book Review

'I have rarely read a book this transformational or darkly inspiring. A landmark in the literature of women's experience. This is a harrowing but poetically told account of a young girl's emotional abuse and in a sense, enslavement, at the hands of two badly damaged parents, set hauntingly in the context of apartheid era South Africa.' --Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth

'A beautiful evocation of childhood. Like colours slowly blooming downstream.' --Nadeem Aslam, author of Maps for Lost Lovers