Girl on the Edge

Ruth’s parents were prominent communists in the struggle against apartheid, and this is the honest, funny, at times heartwrenching story of a childhood disrupted. With an artist’s eye for detail and colour, Carneson recalls her life with unflinching honesty: the Treason Trial; her struggle to conform; her exile to the UK; the Friern Barnet Asylum for the “hopelessly insane”; her experiences with LSD, protests and free love in London; art school and motherhood; communes and campaigning – all steps in a journey that finally brought her home to a South Africa on the brink of change.