Cape Town

Cape Town is a place between. Between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. So too the majority of its citizens, a people between black and white, native and settler, African and European. This tween-ness complicates and perplexes. It threatens key conceptions we have about the histories, identities, and cultures of those who live on the continent. It makes us wonder how we can understand a city that is most assuredly in Africa, though not--seemingly--of it?

But it is by exploring these liminal spaces - between the Cape's breathtaking beauty and its shattering violence, between its creative cosmopolitanism and its crude racial divisions, between its glitzy wealth and its grinding poverty - that we can begin to understand the soul of this town. A place haunted by its past, yet unsure of its future. A city always emerging, but never arriving. A sun-drenched peninsula best viewed through a prism noir.

Written in accessible, punchy prose, Cape Town: A Place Between provides an intimate geography of South Africa's Mother City. It's a portrait rendered with humor, wit and passion, based on the author's twenty-year relationship with the Cape.