C.A. Davids: How to be a Revolutionary

HUMA Book Lunch

Author: C.A. Davids

Introduction: An extraordinary, ambitious, globe-spanning novel about what we owe our consciences. 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 twenty-first 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-travelling 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 is also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.

See the book: How to be a Revolutionary (Verso, 2022).

Read extract
Open-access extract, see licencing details on page.
 

About the author: C.A. Davids works as a writer and as an arts worker. Her second novel, How to be a Revolutionary was released in 2022 by Verso Books in the UK and USA and by Penguin Random House in South Africa. Her debut novel, The Blacks of Cape Town, was published in 2013 by Modjaji Books. CA has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, a degree in economics and a postgraduate qualification in marketing from the University of Cape Town. She lives in Cape Town, South Africa, but has also called Shanghai, China, New Jersey in the USA and Basel in Switzerland home.