EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH, narrative non-fiction and the coming of democracy in South Africa

250pp., paperback, Woodbridge & Rochester, 2019

"In a series of carefully crafted chapters, Hedley Twidle explores the full range of South African narrative non-fiction...It is the first serious, sustained intellectual engagement with this expanding corpus of texts...Twidle's refusal to be trapped within the binary categories of fact and fiction leads to a cross-reading approach that enriches our understanding of the aesthetic and historical work that these texts perform. As the final chapter...shows, the major appeal of Experiments with Truth may lie in its own experimentation with the truths of the closure-driven academic monograph." Harry Garuba, Professor of African Studies and English Literature, University of Cape Town

"Hedley Twidle's lucid and sparkling book unsettles our thinking about the relationship between literature and democracy. Among the first serious studies of South African non-fictional forms, it roams through archives, memoirs, journalism and biography to make a decisive case for their literary qualities. But even more strikingly, it shows how literature animates the anti-colonial democratic process as much as democracy does literature." Upamanyu Pable Mukherjee, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick University

Heldey Twidle is a writer, teacher and scholar based in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of the essay collection, Firepool: experiences in an abnormal world.