With tremendous political daring, South African novelist Mike Nicol offers a luminous parable of his country's past. Bawdy and terrifying, fantastical yet eerily familiar, This Day and Age realizes the prophecy told to a newly elected president on the eve of his inauguration. After years of bountiful harmony will come plague and famine, during which a strange man-child with a Bible chained to his wrist and his army of the disenfranchised will gather strength in the most remote reaches of the land. “Mike Nicol joins the roster . . . of Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and the magical realists of Latin America.”—The New York Times Book Review