Blessings on the Sheep Dog - Tapa dura

"With cool intelligence, laconic wit, and deep feeling, Gerda Saunders explores the moral chaos of South Africa and the pain of a new generation of South African exiles." - J. M. Coetzee "A splendidly innovative, entertaining, and sometimes ferocious prose version of what life can be like in our time." - James McManus

In 1984 GERDA SAUNDERS emigrated to the United States from South Africa, where she had worked as a research scientist and math and physics teacher. Upon her arrival in this country, she began writing fiction. She became a U.S. citizen in 1992, and in 1996 she received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. She now designs multi-media instructional materials for computer- and Web-based training. She and her husband, Peter, make their home in Salt Lake City. They have two children who attend the University of Utah. She recently completed her first novel, The Last Pieta of MichelAgniolo. From the violent world of apartheid South Africa to the supposed immigrant haven of the United States, the people in Saunders's debut story collection brave life's big questions about connection, displacement, death, love, race, and justice. Grappling with feelings too disturbing to articulate, they turn to anthropology or math, music or cosmology, to make sense of the dissonance around them. More often than not, the only truth they find is that life is a complicated dance and doing the right thing a moment-by-moment decision. In "We'll Get to Now Later," a guilt-stricken white South African immigrant confronts his apartheid past when he meets a Zulu dancer traveling with a circus in the United States. In "Pig Day," an American teenager accidentally kills his best friend Nick, the son of a Romanian immigrant, and is co-opted by the bereaved father to build Nick's coffin. In "A Sudden New City," Heila, a frail and mentally faltering white South African grandmother, drives a tractor into a black crowd as revenge for her husband's infidelity across the color line. In the tradition of Nadine Gordimer and Norman Rush, but with its own sense of comedy and metaphor, Blessings on the Sheep Dog is a first work by a master storyteller.