The ten stories comprising You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town together make up a coherent short-story cycle, and their publication in 1987 marked Zoë Wicomb's emergence as an important new voice in South African fiction. The stories articulate the pressures and contradictions attendant on a young Coloured (mixed-race) girl's growth to adulthood in the Western Cape during the apartheid era, and they represent a significant development within the tradition of black writing in South Africa.

The daughter of Robert Wicomb and Rachel Le Fleur Wicomb, Zoë Wicomb was born on 23 November 1948 in a remote Griqua settlement named Beeswater, near Vredendal and Van Rhynsdorp in the area of the Western Cape known as Little Namaqualand. It is a hot, dry area situated some four hundred kilometers north of Cape Town, in a region originally inhabited by Khoikhoi clans (from whom the Griqua are partly descended). Her mother...