Yvonne Burgess is one of the most powerful writers currently working in South Africa. Her forte is conveying the thoughts and feelings of the outcasts of society; the marginalised and often destitute characters she creates in such novels as Anna and the Colonel (1997) and A Larger Silence (2000) are unforgettable. In Measure of the Night Wind Burgess again looks with insight and compassion into the lives of three misfits: Vik, a former Civil Cooperation Bureau member, his coloured ”Askari” Mel, and the educated but displaced sculptor Whittelsea Carver, commonly known as ”WC”. This ill-assorted trio board with Marl van Diggelen in what she grandly calls a residential hotel, but which is, in fact, her own run-down home now turned into a rooming house. The unexpected suicide of Marl’s daughter, Em, is the occasion of the novel. This event has left the household — including the domestic, Angelina — shaken and mystified, especially when two inept policemen arrive. The scene that follows as the constable tries to sort out the confused and garrulous answers the boarders offer is a comic masterpiece. The black humour here soon gives way to the sombre meditations of the five characters as each ponders the cause of Em’s actions. A section of the dead girl’s diary gives the reader some understanding of her act, but for Marl it cannot alter the fact that ”suicide accuses. And for those left behind . . . it [is] the most painful, final insult. ”In the course of several interior monologues we learn a great deal about each person’s life, from Mel’s virtual enslavement to the brutal Vik whose atrocities in various border conflicts beggar description, to WC who ponders the efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and feminism’s achievements. The voices of the characters are wonderfully delineated, ranging from Angelina’s faltering English, through Mel’s gammat bilingualism to the eloquence of WC and the self-justifying outpourings of Vik. This is a startling novel full of penetrating truths about South Africa’s unhappy past and the shortcomings of the present.