Böcker av Ivan Vladislavic

Mr and Mrs Malgas are going about their lives when a mysterious squatter appears and convinces Mr Malgas to help him build an imaginary home next door. With its story of the seductive illusions of language, The Folly was initially read as an allegory of the rise and fall of apartheid, but is also sure to resonate with contemporary readers.

A vacant patch of South African veld next to the comfortable, complacent Malgas household has been taken over by a mysterious, eccentric figure with "a plan." Fashioning his tools out of recycled garbage, the stranger enlists Malgas's help in clearing the land and planning his mansion. Slowly but inevitably, the stranger's charm and the novel's richly inventive language draws Malgas into "the plan" and he sees, feels and moves into the new building. Then, just as remorselessly, all that seemed solid begins to melt back into air.

"Surely one of the most ingenious love letters-full of violence, fear, humour, and cunning-ever addressed to a city." -Geoff Dyer

Collects two volumes of short stories by one of contemporary South Africa's most acclaimed novelists.

Explores the problems and potentials of the fictions the author could not bring himself to write. Drawing from his notebooks, this title records here a range of ideas for stories - unsettled accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure - and examines where they came from and why they eluded him.

Ivan Vladislavic invites readers to do some detective work of their own. Each story can be read as a story or you can try to tease out the clues and patterns. Whether skewering extreme marketing techniques or constructing dystopian parallel universes, Vladislavic will make you look beyond appearances.

An insider capable of revealing his city's spirit and its reality, Ivan Vladisavic combines the eloquence of Jan Morris on Trieste with the precision of Henri Cartier-Bresson on Paris.