In Conversation with Irna Gold

Irna will be talking about her new book – Shift.

In the year of the 70th anniversary of the Freedom Charter, which outlined the principles of democracy and freedom in South Africa, comes a novel set in the township where it was signed. Shift asks us to examine both the world around us and ourselves.

Arlie is a moderately successful thirty-something photographer who can’t seem to get his life together. He cannot hold onto a girlfriend, or much else, and his relationship with his parents is complicated. His agoraphobic mother, Dellie, has long drawn silence over her South African upbringing. The more she refuses to illuminate, the more Arlie wants to know.

Gusty and gripping, tender and deeply compassionate, Shift is a compulsively readable story about the messy process of art-making, and the mess of love and family. It is an unflinching, insightful and immersive novel that takes the reader inside the inner life of one township, beyond the hyperbole of newspaper headlines, to offer bold, big-hearted hope.