Amid the Alien Corn

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)><em>Amid the Alien Corn</em></strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)> is a vivid stylishly written memoir that takes its narrator from the bewilderment of childhood and youth towards the unfolding of a mother's secrets long suspected from a pervasive sense of something missing at the heart of his family.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>The book charts the journey from personal and political disorientation in apartheid Cape Town to professional fulfilment in Britain where the discovery of an identity framed by the author's commitment to literary study prompts a quest to explore the relationship between the individual and their times.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(33 37 41 1)>To understand the roots of his mother Ruth's emotional detachment the writer pursues the truth about a family entwined within the systems of oppression that devastated the lives of Black Africans and European Jews throughout the 20th century.</span></p><p></p>