In 1975, Ruth Frank, married and living in the United States, returns to South Africa to visit her aging parents. There she resumes an old liaison with Hugh Stillington, liberal man of Africa, who lives in a bungalow overlooking the Indian Ocean. Hugh’s world is a South Africa Ruth has never known — lush, wild, comfortably dilapidated, socially and politically courageous. Intoxicated, she begins to feel at home there, setting herself beyond the pale of her own society, and in the way of danger.

Praise for THE BUNGALOW

“Time, memory, identity, continuity and exile: Freed is caught up in a white South African version of expatriation in which one never finally leaves home . . . The refreshing aspect of her account, however, is how these deeper themes are enmeshed with a positively wicked sense of humor.”
—The Boston Globe

“Deeply absorbing and ambitious… astonishingly vivid.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Ms. Freed portrays the theatrical atmosphere in which class and taste are assessed and sustained through clothes, food, hairstyles and interior decoration, while the black servants vacuum and cook, argue and laugh, until they are finally sent off duty to the back of the house, leaving the whites a fragile privacy at the end of the day, when sherry is poured from cut-glass decanters… Ms. Freed avoids simple labels of good and bad, and that is what makes her novel so arresting.”
—The New York Times Book Review

Publisher: Story Line Press (September 1, 1999)
ISBN: 1885266766
Paperback: 240 pages

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 1, 1993)
ISBN: 0671755870
Hardcover: 240 pages