Böcker av Barbara Adair

In the Shadow of the Springs I Saw is an exploration, and stories, of people who live in the Art Deco buildings of Springs. It is the imagined lives of those who live in a space that is not theirs historically but one that they have reclaimed. This work, in times of doom and complaint, creates a new narrative: one of revival, vigour and celebration. 'The writing tries to capture the "grain" of a place, object or conversation, as if a swatch were cut from a larger fabric. One could trace the use of similar techniques back to the canonical modernist works of James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, William Carlos Williams or to a later experimenter like Burroughs ... Adair uses these techniques with flair and purpose ... the book's method is to declare and contradict, to present one side and then another, keeping both present.'Ivan Vladislavic Barbara Adair is a novelist and writer. In Tangier we Killed the Blue Parrot was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Award in 2004. Her novel End was shortlisted for Africa Regional Commonwealth Prize.

A man is travelling to Africa from Europe. And yet it is also about waiting - waiting for Africa.Volker, a German, leaves his home in Frankfurt for Windhoek. He leaves a lover, he is leaving for a long time, and he does not have a return ticket. He does not know anything about Africa, to him it is one country, not a continent, neither does he really know where he is going to; he just knows that he wants to leave Europe.Lufthansa, the airline that carries him stops at Charles de Gaulle airport and here he waits and waits and waits. And in the airport he observes and describes and thinks. The text is a stream of consciousness, Volker's thoughts. Interspersed with this are stories of people he encounters in the airport; a murderer, a terrorist, a person with dwarfism, a trans woman, a porn star, a terrorist, a child trafficker, a paedophile. All are connected, with each other, with Volker and with us, the readers.Adair's novel is innovative in form, self-conscious and self-critical; it challenges conventional Western assumptions that all good novels have a clear story line, a good plot and fully rounded characters.