Jamestown Blues

Published by Penguin Books, 1996.

ISBN-13: 978-0140248272

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The story behind the story

This is a novel about a young girl growing up near a salt mine in Botswana in the 1980s, daughter of a Motswana man and a white English expatriate mother.

I got the idea because I was living in a salt mining town, and the mine was soon to be at the centre of a major investigation into alleged racism and corruption. When I heard about a couple who wanted to set up a school in the town I imagined what might happen if I had a child, and if she went to that school, and if her involvement with the expats nearly destroyed her family.