In Vladislavic's unusual take on South African apartheid, Neville Lister, a college student in Johannesburg in the 1980s, decides that he wants to experience the real world and drops out of university. His father has him spend a day with Saul Auerbach, a noted photographer. Auerbach comes up with the idea of picking three houses at random, then photographing their owners and listening to their stories. But after visiting the first two houses, the photographer loses interest and scraps the idea. It is only a decade later that Neville decides to complete Auerbach's task.

In that intervening time, Neville has moved to London to escape army service, become a photographer himself, and returned to Johannesburg to see the changes caused by the end of apartheid. Along the way, we see Neville's relationship with his widowed mother, we meet the several women in his life, and we are told of his ambivalent attitude toward his art. It's this ambivalence that makes Neville a frustrating character, although the author crafts the details of his life with a crystalline clarity. The subject of apartheid is treated in the most glancing way, a possible comment on how historical movements are sometimes secondary considerations in the lives of ordinary people.

IVAN VLADISLAVIC is the author of the novels The Folly, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative. The last of these appeared initially in TJ/Double Negative, a joint project with the photographer David Goldblatt. Vladislavi? has written extensively about Johannesburg, notably in Portrait with Keys (2006). He has edited volumes on architecture and art, and published a monograph on the conceptual artist Willem Boshoff. The compendium volume Flashback Hotel (2010) gathered together his early stories. Recent books are The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories, a reflection on writing and other things, and A Labour of Moles, a small comedy of meanings illustrated by Ornan Rotem. His work has won the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the Alan Paton Award and the University of Johannesburg Prize, while TJ/Double Negative received the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Award for best photography book.

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