Always Another Country, a graceful memoir by Sisonke Msimang, is a welcome novelty. Msimang, a South African writer and political analyst, charts an alternate course to the now familiar conclusion that home is not always a place on a map.
Before personal and political events finally allowed her to go 'home' to South Africa, Msimang spent her first 20-plus years in peripatetic exile ... Hauntingly raw (her sexual assault at age seven) and unblinkingly honest (her lingering hatred of a school bully), Msimang’s memoir and first book recounts the intimate, inspiring, tumultuous journey of a woman 'piecing [herself] back together.'
Sisonke Msimang had to grow up fast. In Always Another Country, one of South Africa’s emerging social critics tells the story of her youth, bouncing between continents and cultures, all the while being 'bottle-fed the dream' of a free South Africa by her mother and her exiled African National Congress father ... Msimang points unflinchingly to her country’s open wounds. She is as critical of the ANC leadership as she is of oblivious white compatriots. Her memoir is a unique perspective on South Africa’s recent history that fundamentally tells the struggle of a deeply torn woman to comprehend a deeply torn country.
