6 December 2013. It is a searing hot day in Johannesburg. Gin has returned to the city of her birth to throw a party for her mother''s eightieth birthday. She is determined with lists and meals and flower arrangements to show that she has become a fully capable woman. She knows deep down her mother will only ever see a lost cause. Meanwhile outside crowds of citizens and the world''s media have gathered to hear the expected announcement: Nelson Mandela has died. Set across the course of a single momentous day and narrated by a chorus of voices Fiona Melrose''s second novel is a hymn to an extraordinary city and its people an ambitious homage to Virginia Woolf''s Mrs Dalloway and a devastating personal and political manifesto on mothers and daughters justice and love. ''Beautifully observed'' Mail on Sunday ''Woolf produced blooms that are impossible to emulate. Johannesburg provides evidence of a novelist who can grow inimitable flowers herself'' Spectator. Language: English