Rooted — David Robbins

Rooted Love, desire, moral force, failure, courage, mortality. These fundamental human realities burn at the heart of this extraordinary collection. The various stories explore the harsh and frequently degrading interface between the rural and urban experience. Description ROOTED contains a collection of short stories by South African writer David Robbins. These carefully revised pieces, first published 20 years ago by Jonathan Ball Publishers, represent some of his earliest and most powerful work. The characters depicted are mid-20th century Afrikaners caught in the often-brutal processes of urbanisation; but their situations will remain universal for as long as people are compelled by socio-economic circumstances to move from countryside to city. DAVID ROBBINS has been publishing since the mid-1980s. His travel book The 29th Parallel (Shuter & Shooter in 1986 and 1987; Penguin in 1990) won the CNA Literary Award for 1986, while in 2008 his On the Bridge of Goodbye (Jonathan Ball Publishers) was short-listed for the Via Afrika Recht Malan non-fiction award. In the intervening years he has published regularly on southern African themes. His Aspects of Africa (Viking in 1995; Penguin in 1996) was repeatedly reordered by British bookshops during the latter half of the 1990s. ROOTED will appeal to readers with an interest in beautifully rendered pieces in the short-story genre. The theme of urbanisation continues to dominate the world of the 21st century. In that sense the stories retain their topicality while at the same time providing an intimate look at specific historical realities. Afrikaner urbanisation was a theme, admits the author in his introduction, that set fire to his imagination when he was young. The result is fiction of the highest order that is also historically accurate and valuable.