The Madonna of the Excelsior by Zakes Mda / Hardcover -1st Edition. 1st Printing [NOVEL]

The Madonna of the Excelsior
Zakes Mda

Farrar Straus Giroux. 2004. Hardcover. 258pp. 1st Edition. 1st Printing. Mild soiling to the boards, still a VERY GOOD+ copy. The dustjacket is unclipped with minor soil to the verso of jacket only, no tears, VERY GOOD+.

Jacket design by Kwasi Osei. Jacket art: Madonna and Child by Tim Ashkar. 

In THE MADONNA OF EXCELSIOR, the new novel by the acclaimed South African writer Zakes Mda, a sex scandal in a small town is transformed into an emblematic story of a country whose racial history can be rendered authoritatively only in art. In 1971, nineteen citizens of Excelsior, a farming community in South Africa s rural Free State, were charged with breaking apartheid s Immorality Act, which forbade sexual relations between blacks and whites on the pretext of avoiding miscegenation. The women were jailed as they awaited trial and their white counterparts were released on bail. In the end, the state withdrew the charges, but the accused women s lives, already complicated, became harder than ever. Mda tells the story of a family at the heart of the scandal, revealing a country in which apartheid, even as it sought to keep the races apart, concealed interracial liaisons of every kind