The thirty-nine stories in Asleep Awake Asleep can be read as a hand-drawn narrative map, charting the course of a countrys turbulent history. Together they tell a coming of age and a coming to consciousness story, as Rip child, adult, journalist, partner, mother revisits milestones marked and signposts ignored or unseen. Set in the suburbs and newsrooms of South African towns and cities and their wilder surrounds, there are vignettes of relationships; tales of political assassinations, murder and betrayal, and questions asked about complicity and reparation.