Tony Eprile

The Persistence of Memory

A Novel

"Throws all its chips in the air like a dazzling Nabokovian trick."—Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times Book Review

In this humane yet savagely witty portrait of apartheid South Africa in its waning years, Tony Eprile renders his homeland's turbulent past with striking clarity. The Baltimore Sun declared Eprile's "horrifying yet heartrendingly beautiful" prose to be "comparable to his fellow authors of Apartheid Andre Brink and Nadine Gordimer." As the novel builds to a harrowing conclusion, the protagonist, a veteran of the secret war in Angola and Namibia, is forced to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee with astonishing results. Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee calls The Persistence of Memory "a story of coming to maturity in South Africa in the bad old days. Always warm-hearted, sometimes comic, ultimately damning." Reading group guide included.


Tony Eprile is the author of Temporary Sojourner & Other South African Stories, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He grew up in South Africa and lives in Bennington, Vermont.
The Persistence of Memory


July 2005 / trade paper / ISBN 0-393-32722-1 / 304 pages / FICTION
Original hardcover edition: ISBN 0-393-05888-3
Norton Home
Trade Home
Order Paper
Order Cloth
View Your Shopping Cart