Helga Divin, the matriarch of this prominent white family from Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, lies dying in the London mansion of her second husband, industrialist Arnold Miro. Her children, Danny and Bridget, both successfully established in Boston, rush to her side. The pair soon realize that Arnold, in addition to mistreating their mother, plans to steal a collection of African artifacts their late father spent a lifetime assembling. The most important pieces in the collection are majestic tusks whose provenance traces to the legendary king Shaka Zulu, who presented them to the first white men to set foot in Zululand back in the 1800s. To their father—and now to Danny and Bridget—the tusks have both personal meaning and great historic value. The Divins seethe when they hear Arnold expropriate their father’s stories about “his” African collection, along with the collection itself. When Danny and Bridget move to thwart Arnold they find themselves facing the layers of myth surrounding their family, their youth and even their own identities under apartheid. This process accelerates when Danny, Bridget, and their families return to Durban to honor their mother. There, amid the turbulence of contemporary South Africa reinventing itself as a multi-racial democracy, they come to realize that what they have always believed about themselves is as fragile and suspect as the stories they and others once accepted as truth. Ivory from Paradise features many of the same characters who appear in Empire Settings--winner of the John Gardner Fiction Award--also available from Academy Chicago.

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