How to Be a Revolutionary: A Novel

In How to Be a Revolutionary, Beth flees her moribund marriage in Cape Town and accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai, where she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude. She discovers a shared love of Langston Hughes with Zhao, but when he vanishes, a typewritten manuscript appears at her doorstep, revealing truths about her past and the long-buried story of her revolutionary friend Kay. The novel connects contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising, exploring what we owe our countries, consciences, and selves.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 08 February 2022
Publisher: 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 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.

Weight: 252g
Dimension: 134 x 197 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781839760877