"In South Africa today the new leaders talk of the future, while those from whom they took over—their hands, as someone memorably said, covered in blood and gravy—prefer to forget. For that reason, a memoir like André Brink's A Fork in the Road is not only timely, it is also a small act of rebellion. It declines to forget the granite years of apartheid, and it looks with alarm at what has happened to the ideals and illusions of those who imagined new freedoms would exorcise old demons.... Brink grew up in a small dorp, in the shadow of the local Dutch Reformed Church. His father was a magistrate, a convinced believer in the truth of Afrikaner racial superiority.... It was against this theocracy that Brink rebelled. Paris, and the excitement of the 1968 student upheavals, blew holes in his parochialism and he broke with his past, his parents, his party and most of his compatriots. He was part of a group of young novelists known as the Sestigers—'the Sixtiers'—who became the first Afrikaans writers to attack the system from within.... Brink has always been quick—some might say too quick—to tie his novels to the hot-button events of the apartheid regime. Their titles often reflect his eye for the political excitements of the moment: A Dry White Season, An Act of Terror, States of Emergency. His autobiography revisits many of these vital markers of South African political history—the Sharpeville shootings, the Soweto risings, the murder of Steve Biko and the release of Nelson Mandela. But here they are interwoven with memories of lovers, marriages, operas and literary junkets in Africa, Poland and South America in what becomes a crowded, whistle-stop tour of a busy life.... The tone becomes that of the after-dinner speaker determined to find a graceful word for everyone.... Happily, Brink does not bow out among the great, the good and the dead. There is a good deal of fight left in the man who once had his critics and his friends hopping up and down with annoyance.... The real kick in this book comes last. After supporting all his life the vision of a better way for all in South Africa, Brink is appalled by what change has brought and he is not afraid to say so. He tears into a governing elite who resemble nothing so much as the brigands they succeeded... The final pages of A Fork in the Road are made of the stuff that once got him banned. But in the end, faced by having to choose despair or good cheer, Brink quixotically opts for both. This is just as well because anyone claiming to see the road ahead is dangerously confused."—Guardian (London)