More than a memoir, this exploration of what it means to remember and honour a parent navigates the vast seas of memory with delicate skill.

Lesley, the author’s mother, was an artist, communist and bohemian at a time in South Africa’s history that brooked no dissidence. A woman disappointed in human love, she was to find serenity and joy in love of a more mystic nature. In the effort to reassemble her life and his family history, Michael Cope takes fragments from a wide range of inventive sources and creates a dazzling, quirky and intensely moving mosaic of his own making.

This magpie snapshot of one family’s life in apartheid South Africa has it all: walk-on performances by Uys Krige, Ingrid Jonker and Albie Sachs, great art and beauty, an African farm, passages to India, and love that transcends death. At the  same time, it is a candid account of how an imaginative child survives the breakdown of his parents’ marriage.