Goodbye South Africa

In 1966, thirteen-year-old Annabelle Bradlow is uprooted from Johannesburg and thrust into suburban New York when her father, a Jewish doctor, flees the mounting dangers of apartheid. The move promises safety, but instead delivers disorientation, isolation, and a quiet unraveling Annabelle cannot control.As she struggles to find her footing between cultures, expectations, and a fractured home life, Annabelle searches for certainty wherever she can find it-family, faith, even reinvention. But belonging proves elusive, and the consequences of misplaced trust are devastating.Spanning continents and coming of age against the backdrop of political and personal upheaval, Annabelle's journey becomes a question of survival: not just where she can live, but who she can become when everything familiar has been stripped away.Gillian Lynn Katz grew up during the Apartheid era in South Africa and immigrated to New York as a teenager in 1966. Goodbye South Africa is the story of immigrants, like her family, who fled political unrest in South Africa and rebuilt their lives in the United States."A compelling coming-of-age story that explores emigration, race, religion, and the struggle to belong." - James King, author of Bill Warrington's Last Chance Winner of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award "A thoughtful story about a young girl uprooted from South Africa during apartheid and trying to find her footing in America. Her struggles with OCD, family, pressures, and the shock of starting over give the book a quiet, emotional pull. A heartfelt look at displacement, identity, and learning to cope in unfamiliar territory." - Carole Bellacera, author of Border Crossings"Gillian Lynn Katz's moving tale about, family, politics and transitions personalizes the complicated story of South Africa's transition from apartheid to freedom. Through the eyes of a teenager, Katz creates a compelling world fraught with the difficulties of understanding, and the problems of moving continents, all the while holding onto values, and hope." - Esther Cohen, author of All of Us "Gillian Katz introduces us to Annabelle, a Jewish girl encountering all the struggles and rewards of growing up and finding oneself and one's place in the world, while also tackling the complicated society that surrounds her growing up in South Africa at the height of apartheid and in the American suburbs of the 1960's. Themes of family, identity, faith, mental health, and love are all explored in a work that is both an elegy for and a critical appraisal of both the land of her birth and the country that she has adopted as her own." - Dr. Gail Labovitz, author of Marriage and Metaphor