C. A. Davids joined award-winning author Ladee Hubbard (The Talented Ribkins) around the launch of Davids’s stunning new novel How to Be a Revolutionary. Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising— and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Langston Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protégé about the poet’s time in Shanghai—How to Be a Revolutionary is a novel of staggering ambition. It is also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.
Featured Book
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How to Be a Revolutionary
By C. A. Davids
Published by Verso Books
Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.
At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes—who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript—chunk by chunk—appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend…
Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising—and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes’ confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet’s time in Shanghai—How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It’s also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.
In Conversation
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C. A. Davids
C. A. Davids
C. A. Davids’s debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in South Africa and shortlisted for the Edinburgh International Book Festival’s First Book Award, the University of Johannesburg Debut Writing Prize, and the SALA First-Time Published Author Award, among others. She lives in Cape Town.
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Ladee Hubbard
Ladee Hubbard
Ladee Hubbard is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins, which received the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and The Rib King. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly, and Callaloo among other venues. She currently lives in New Orleans.