Ways of Staying

When his cousin was killed in a vicious random attack, the questions Kevin Bloom had been asking as a journalist about the troubling political and social changes in this country took on a devastating personal urgency. Suddenly it felt as though South Africa was no longer the place he had grown up in or the place that felt like home.

At times brutal and raw, at times tender and compassionate, Ways of Staying is Bloom’s critically acclaimed exploration of the violence that characterises the country he lives in, and of how South Africans adjust their lives in order to continue living here. From his cousin’s murder in 2006 to the fatal shooting of historian David Rattray, and from the ANC showdown in Polokwane to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, Bloom takes the reader on a profoundly moving journey of the heart and mind; a journey that also finds hope in those men and women who believe that South Africa’s history can be overcome to create a kinder future.