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Ashraf Jamal. The shades.
Ashraf Jamal's first collection of stories tracks the states of unease of life in South Africa's new democracy. Chilling and haunting, the stories draw the reader into a web of psychic unrest. Flight and fear, revenge and atonement, guilt and innocence are the conflicting themes of a searching and suspenseful collection. Here Jamal shifts from drama and the novel to place his own unique stamp on the short story form. More fragment than story, more shade than colour, The Shades is as compelling as it is enriching. Perceived by the author as variations on a story, The Shades assembles a broken mosaic of who and what we are and what we must become.
Ashraf Jamal is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present (David Philip), the author of A million years ago, in the nineties (Brevitas) and Love Themes for the Wilderness (Kwela Books), which was short-listed for the M-Net Prize and published in German as Liebeslieder f�r die Wildnis (Verlagshaus No.8).
Extract from his short story called Empty, which is about a prostitute:
She doesn't think anyone can see her. People never did, why should they now? Black skin. Black dress. Black in the black night. Even the blood she sees on her splayed thigh is black . . . The pain echoes now but no one can hear her.
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