BOOKS THAT HOOK

Two new releases that will keep you reading late into the night

ISTARTED reading Mashigo’s debut novel over supper and this is what happened: at first it wheeled along effortlessly but artlessly, or so I thought – until I happened upon a really original sex scene 20 pages in, when I sat back on my heels and thought, “Waaaaaaait a minute . . .”

I was still trying to pigeonhole the book and going by the hip, urban young heroine who works on a wine farm and has an equally hip and fabulously international boyfriend. I was thinking “commercial but with heft and complexity”.

Then, as the walls of reality began to expand and shimmer, I realised I was feeling something similar to the way I felt reading Zakes Mda’s Ways Of Dying in manuscript form, that sense of being on the verge of a truly amazing discovery.

The heroine, Rubi, has unexplained seizures but other than that it’s impossible to say what this book is about without major spoilers.

It’s also impossible to talk about how the narrative shifts between the patterns of everyday life and Rubi’s deep cultural taproots into a much wider and wiser world without sounding like the worst kind of anthropologising white reviewer – “Take one thoroughly modern heroine, add African cosmology and stir” sorta stuff.

Maybe what I can say is that it made me realise just how narrow and impoverished Western, urban and medicalised understandings of post-traumatic stress disorder are.

Towards the end (at 2 am) I was reeling so much from the way the plot threads were ravelling I had to put the book down. Then it kept me awake, my mind whirling.

This novel is funny, humane and heartbreaking. It’s not perfect (when do I ever think a book is?). I believe prologues in fiction are unnecessary in 99 percent of cases so I nearly fell at the first page, although the book does have one of the best opening lines ever. A truly astonishing and exciting debut.