In her much anticipated memoir, Sisonke Msimang writes about her exile childhood in Zambia and Kenya, young adulthood and college years in North America, and returning to South Africa in the euphoric 1990s. She reflects candidly on her discontent and disappointment with present day South Africa but also on her experiences of family, romance, and motherhood, with the novelist’s talent for character and pathos.

Militant young comrades dance off the pages of the 1970s Lusaka she invokes, and the heady and naive days of just-democratic South Africa in the 1990s are as vividly painted. Her memoir is at heart a chronicle of a coming-of age, and while well-known South African political figures appear in these pages, it is an intimate story, a testament to family bonds and sisterhood.

Sisonke Msimang is one of the most assured and celebrated voices commenting on the South African present – often humorously; sometimes deeply movingly – and this book launches her to an even broader audience.

‘[Msimang] dances between the pages, moving effortlessly between
personal reflection and the prose of history and context…it is second to
none.’ – Independent Online

‘Msimang is a masterful storyteller. Her memoir cements her place as
one of the country’s most beloved writers.’ – The Daily Vox

‘[A] dance between memory, fiction, history and nostalgia, Always
Another Country is highly recommended.’ – Mail and Guardian

‘An intensely personal story, and yet it is the story of many South
Africans: the search for home and belonging in the face of gross
injustice.’ – News24

‘[A] provocative and enjoyable book.’ – The Times

‘Msimang has managed to pull off a compelling memoir – racy and Afro
funky; cosmopolitan and pan-Africanist; inter-sectional and intimate.’ –
Spotlight Africa

‘Msimang is able to mobilise the genre of memoir to think through
deeper political, philosophical and existential questions about how
race, class and gender can configure with one’s sense of belonging,
especially if one has never quite known a definitive home.’ – The Con

‘Rather than a search for some essential truth about the post-Apartheid
condition, Msimang writes of liberation, both personal and political as a
journey, and of how movements and places makes us who we are.’ –
Africa is a Country