We’re delighted to present Imraan Coovadia‘s new novel, A Spy in Time, which will be published in 2018 by Fourie Botha at Penguin Random House South Africa and Renuka Chatterjee at the Indian publishers Speaking Tiger for the whole of the Indian sub-continent and South East Asia.
A Spy in Time (working title) is a literary time travel novel with a daring and original African-centric story which also touches on global issues history, race and inequality. In Enver Eleven’s city, fair-skinned people are a rarity and have been for centuries. Johannesburg is the city that survived the end of the world thanks to the shelter provided by the thousands of miles of mining tunnels running beneath it. He and his mentor, Simon Six, specialize in the hot spots of the twentieth century —Marrakech, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo— where they travel in search of an elusive enemy, guided by the collective intelligence of the Agency’s thinking machines which limit time travel to the bare minimum. When Simon vanishes on an assignment, Enver finds himself in the middle of a catastrophe which will require him to put his assumptions to the test in an atmosphere of conspiracy and intrigue.
Imraan Coovadia (Durban, 1970) has become one of the most prominent and innovative writers in South Africa. He has won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, The University of Johannesburg Prize, the M-Net Prize and has been shortlisted for the Ama-Boeke Prize (2003) and the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. He is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Cape Town and is a regular contributor to various newspapers, journals and magazines such as N+1, Agni, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Times of India, and South Africa's The Mail and Guardian and Sunday Independent. His writing has been the focus of a 2016 special issue of the scholarly journal Current Writing.
“Imraan Coovadia is one of the best novelists to come out of South Africa in a long time. His prose is charming, clever and sly. A must-read.” Gary Shteyngart
Imraan Coovadia's new novel might be the African time travel novel everyone was waiting for, and will appeal to fans of Interstellar, Blade Runner, Cloud Atlas, District 9 and Stanislaw Lem, among others.
For more information, please contact Marina Penalva.