• City of Johannesburg Library & Information Services, South Africa

Publisher of Nominated Edition
Secker & Warburg ISBN 0436210258

Camille Pascal, a young, unmarried French nurse comes to South Africa with her father and her small daughter, Zara, during the closing years of the apartheid regime. The family settles amongst a wine-growing community in the Western Cape where they become involved in the lives of victims of the System.

Interwoven with Camille's story is that of Jake Coleman, a painter with an international reputation, a deep-seated fear of failure, and a complicated private life. It is in the exclusive Jake Coleman School of Art that Zara, now a talented artist in her late teens, decides to enrol. She is a feral, troubled girl, obsessed with scenes of violence, and quite unlike anything Jake has encountered.

One Tongue Singing explores some of the different faces of power, both in the ways it operates between individuals and in societies. It is written with economy, humanity and a hard brilliance, and it announces a distinctive new voice from South Africa.

Susan Mann was born in Durban, South Africa, in 1967. She spent eleven years working in the media, mainly as a copywriter, and now teaches in the University of Cape Town's Film and Media Programme. She lives in Cape Town.