Always Another Country

Sisonke Msimang grew up in exile, the daughter of an ANC guerrilla fighter and a mother who held a family together across Zambia, Kenya, Canada, and the United States during the worst decades of apartheid. The memoir follows her childhood in Lusaka and Nairobi, her undergraduate years at Macalester College in Minnesota, her early-adult identity-and-romance reckoning in the diaspora, and her eventual return to a newly free South Africa that did not match the country her parents had imagined. Msimang writes with the same warmth and political sharpness she brings to her TED Talks and her essays, building a book that is part family story, part political coming-of-age.