WHAT WE LOSE

by Zinzi Clemmons (Fourth Estate £12.99)

THIS debut novel is a memoir trying hard to pass itself off as fiction. The narrator, Thandi, is an academically gifted young woman living in Philadelphia with her father and caring for her South African mother, who is dying of cancer.

Her thoughts and experiences as she navigates the contours of grief, sex, pregnancy, identity and love are narrated in scrapbook form, with the occasional entry veering off into events in recent South African history, such as the Oscar Pistorius trial or the complicity of Winnie Mandela in acts of violence.

Clemmons, who shares a lot of biography with her narrator, has a bracingly clear-eyed view on racial politics and the psychological dissonance of living between two cultures, and the tension between her steady prose and turbulent emotions is beautifully sustained.

Yet I found it frustrating. Where writers such as Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante have produced dazzling books by blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, Clemmons has yet to make this territory her own.