Natural Elements by Richard Mason (signed & dated, relating to the book dedication)

Alfred A Knopf, NY, 2009, hardcover, 400 pages, apart from the inscription, condition: as new. 

In his dazzling new novel Mason writes about mothers and daughters; aging and death; memory and longing; history and narrative; and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life. While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joans girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading. . .Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks allher future, the fund, her mothers well-being. As the stories of mother and daughter intersect, each in a race against timeJoan struggling to live in the present (she cannot believe her days will end in an institution); her daughter racing at breakneck speed toward the precipice of disasterthe novel rushes to its stunning conclusion.

INSCRIPTION READS," To Uncle Arthur, the grandson of Naomi Cecilia de Klerk ( the great-grandmother of the author, who was incarcerated in a british concentration camp, several family members dying in the camps), ..... signed, dated with place by the author."

The dedication is stated in the AFTERWORD

Award-winning novelist Richard Mason was born in South Africa and lives in London. He was 21 when his first novel The Drowning People was published. It sold more than a million copies in 28 languages and won Italys Cavour Prize for Best First Novel. After his second novel Us, he began a collection of interconnected works that now include The Lighted Rooms, History of a Pleasure Seeker and Who Killed Piet Barol?