Francis King

The Wind of Change

Frankie and Stankie

By

Bloomsbury 307pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

ONE SENSES THAT, like many another Bildungsroman, this novel, sprawling episodically over the childhood, adolescence and early adulthood of its central character, might have been subtitled ‘Instead of an Autobiography’. Lke her heroine Dinah, Barbara Trapido grew up, the daughter of European immigrants, in South Afiica; like her, she married a historian (in the novel Sam, in real life Stan), also a child of European immigrants, whom she accompanied to England to escape the increasing horrors of apartheid.

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