Set in South Africa in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, this is the story of Ruth, youngest of three daughters in the flamboyant, theatrical Frank family. Brash, clear-eyed and passionate, Ruth moves through a decade of drama on every front — the family, the servants, the theatre, and the country at large—wondering always how she will escape into the “real world” at last.

Praise for HOME GROUND

“Here’s a rarity: a novel about childhood and adolescence that never lapses into self-pity, that rings true… that regards adults sympathetically if unsparingly, that deals with serious thematic material, and that is quite deliciously funny. Home Ground is all this and more.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

“Freed’s guileless child-narrator takes us inside the neurosis of South Africa.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Home Ground is crisp and uncluttered. The dialogue is sharp and colorfully idiomatic. It is often funny, particularly in scenes of Ruth’s youthful sexual explorations and in the missed connections between black and white. Freed… captures the quality of complacent unreality that has pervaded white South Africa.”
—The Philadephia Inquirer

Publisher: Story Line Press (April 15, 1999)
ISBN: 1885266715
Paperback: 288 pages