Yearning to find the truth takes many shocking twists and turns

Novel delves into African mysticism

Title: The Yearning

Author: Mohale Mashigo

Publisher: Picador Africa

Reviewer: Londiwe Dlomo

The truth will out, or else the fire of discovery will burn a trail one can’t help but follow.

Marubini is on this very trek when we meet her albeit unbeknown to her and the reader. The Yearning is a tale of truths and the supernatural that is achingly familiar.

Mohale Mashigo navigates her protagonists’ journey with a lightness that belies the dark matters and subjects soon to be revealed to us.

The reader embarks on an unravelling of the main character with each chapter that goes by. The twists and turns encountered are shocking and unexpected.

The openness and normality portrayed when the book delves into an area deemed a strange and mystic part of the African culture is refreshing.

The reader does not feel like a tourist in Marubini’s story. You are beside her as she navigates towards the truth of her life. The story is written in the first-person narrative, but it’s the scenes described that add a familiarity and an opportunity to see oneself in the story. The days spent with her grandparents, the location she grows up in.

Her story shines a light on many things. When do children start seeing their parents as human? How far does the love of a parent for their child go?

The Yearning is a book about truth and how as cliché as it may sound it sets us free. Mashigo writes about Marubini’s truth against a backdrop of African culture, family, love and this country’s history without letting any of it be intrusive. It fits and forms perfectly as part of her story.