"I found myself in the thick of things. I shut my eyes experimentally, opened them again. If I was dreaming, the scene should change - but no, everything was exactly as it had been before."

So begins A Labour of Moles, by one of South Africa's most important writers, Ivan Vladislavic: a story which takes the reader into a realm utterly alien and at the same time as familiar as the letters forming the words on the page and the very building-blocks of fiction.