6 December 2013. Johannesburg.

Gin has returned home from New York to throw a party for her mother's eightieth birthday; a few blocks away, at the Residence, Nelson Mandela's family prepares to announce Tata's death...

So begins Johannesburg, Fiona Melrose's searing second novel.

An irascible mother, an anxious daughter trying to negotiate her birthplace and her past, her former lover, their domestic workers, a homeless hunchback fighting for justice, a mining magnate, a troubled novelist called Virginia - these are the characters who give voice to the city on a day hot with nerves and tension and history.

Set across the course of a single day, responsive to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, Johannesburg is a profound hymn to an extraordinary city, and a devastating personal and political manifesto on love.