Grahamstown launch of The Chameleon House at Eastern Star Museum

James Whyle (The Book of War) says this:
“Melissa de Villiers has a way with endings. Her stories, as is the case with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff, are bigger on the inside.”

Makhosazana Xaba (Running and Other Stories) says:
“The nine stories in this collection read like a sweet dream – they creep into your consciousness with their kaleidoscope of lives lived passionately and sometimes dangerously…”

Romesh Gunesekera says: ‘A tough, sharp collection of stories offering unexpected glimpses of a changing country.’

More about The Chameleon House:
In her finely woven collection of stories – spanning South Africa, London and Singapore – de Villiers deftly probes the ambiguities of different kinds of love and empathy as she brings a variety of people closer together in unexpected ways.

There’s the not-quite twenty-year old journalist, with the world open to her but not knowing what to do with it, who finds herself at the Baviaan’s Drift Bugle under the watchful eye of an old acquaintance of her father’s; an older woman with her young lover, caught in Johannesburg traffic during ‘load shedding’, the new leveller; and a young boy who finds a painful intimacy with his mother’s boyfriend through the beatings he receives from him. And then there are the four friends sharing a house in London, where the only thing they have in common is that they have all left home. But do they really know anything about each other?

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