Tales of the Metric System (Modern African Writing")

"In Tales of the Metric System, Imraan Coovadia's sere, direct sentences light a fire as he parses South Africa across the decades, from 1970 into the present. As Salman Rushdie used Indian independence in Midnight's Children, Coovadia takes his homeland's transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up to the light and examining it from multiple perspectives. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist's granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice--each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and formally daring."--Back cover.