South African identities, as they are represented in the contemporary South African novel, are not homogeneous but fractured and often conflicted: African, Afrikaner, `coloured', English, and Indian - none can be regarded as rooted or pure, whatever essentialist claims members of these various ethnic and cultural communities might want to make for them.

All of them, this book argues, are deeply divided and have arisen, directly or indirectly, out of the experience of diasporic displacement, migration and relocation, from the colonial, African and Indian diasporas to present-day migrations into and out of South Africa and diasporic dislocations within Africa.

This study of twenty works by twelve contemporary South African novelists - Breyten Breytenbach, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Aziz Hassim, Michiel Heyns, Elsa Joubert, Zakes Mda, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Karel Schoeman, Patricia Schonstein Pinnock, Ivan Vladislavic and Zoe Wicomb - shows how diaspora is a dominant theme in contemporary South African fiction, and the diasporic subject its most recognisable figure.