The bungalow : a novel / [electronic resource]
Lynn Freed.
- New York : Poseidon Press, c1993.
- 237 p. ; 24 cm.
This haunting, beautifully composed novel brilliantly evokes the end of an era, and the small, magical spark that ignites a new beginning. For over ten years, Ruth Frank, the memorable protagonist of Home Ground, has been coming home to the world she left behind in South Africa. Home from Oxford. Home from New York. Home from her childless and passionless marriage in New York. Since leaving South Africa, Ruth has congratulated herself on leaving the best of both worlds: the "real world" of Oxford and New York and "home" - the South Africa in which she grew up, and to which she returns regularly for visits. But now, in 1975, the world of her eccentric, theatrical Jewish parents seems only casually connected to the country it is placed in. And the "real" world that she went overseas to find is spiritually threadbare. But on this visit home Ruth finds Hugh Stillington - old-time liberal, man of Africa. At his bungalow overlooking the. Indian Ocean she experiences a new South Africa - lush, wild, comfortably dilapidated, socially courageous. Intoxicated by Hugh, by his world, by the people of his world, she feels at home for the first time in her life. Gradually Ruth begins to reassess her relationship with her parents, with her conventional married sister, and with the husband she left behind in New York. Then Hugh dies, and Ruth, pregnant with his child, is left to sort through his legacy - a legacy. that asks her to abandon the old constraints and subtle deceptions of an anachronistic society terrified of the future.