more than design, written about the kinds of people I know and have encountered in the country. That is not to say that any one of the characters is a portrait of a specific person; all are works of invention, informed by the ever-shifting collage of personal memory, relationships, and the people who come in and out of one's life. I have also been cautious about trying to inhabit the consciousness of black South Africans, given the country's history of violence (narrative as well as physical and psychological violence) and the many problematic representations of black characters by white writers. Clare, the protagonist of Absolution , is composed of unequal parts of innumerable older women I have known throughout my life, but she arrived in my head as a voice. I knew first and always how she spoke, the slightly old-fashioned, formal, and poetic cadences of her speech, the way she both invites and rebuffs her interlocutor in all their exchanges, the tension between grace and a fierce, impatient intelligence. Speech - the personalised voice, the subjective viewpoint, the focalisation through a particular character even in sections written in the third person - had to be the guiding logic for the book. It was destined to be a book of voices, as a way of speaking to the problem of who can speak, and about who has the right to represent - to narrate - any given event. My preoccupation with voice is rooted in two things: early experiences in