Fiction

From the master of the short short comes a collection of 16 new stories featuring old friends who have loved and lunched together for over 40 years. These erudite, sharp-minded nonagenarians offer startling insights into friendship, family and aging.

Can the group organize a visit to one of their number in her new, and detested, assisted living situation? Is this a fabulous party with old friends, or a funeral reception? And does who was sleeping with whom, way back when, still matter?

In story after story, Segal’s voice is always hilarious and urbane, heartbreaking and profound, keen and utterly unsentimental, as she tackles aging’s affronts.

A true triumph of voice and storytelling, The Book of Night Women rings with both profound authenticity and a distinctly contemporary energy.

It is the story of Lilith, born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even at her birth, the slave women around her recognize a dark power that they- and she-will come to both revere and fear. The Night Women, as they call themselves, have long been plotting a slave revolt, and as Lilith comes of age they see her as the key to their plans. But when she begins to understand her own feelings, desires, and identity, Lilith starts to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman, and risks becoming the conspiracy’s weak link.

But the real revelation of the book-the secret to the stirring imagery and insistent prose-is Marlon James himself, a young writer at once breath­takingly daring and wholly in command of his craft.

Two couples. One steamy affair. And ninety-nine other problems.

Owami meets a man and believes they will live happily ever after. Three children later, she realises all that she thought they had wasn’t true when she finds out that her husband has rekindled a relationship with an ex-girlfriend. She escapes to her parents but fear for the future of her children and some manipulation from her in-laws and her mother, leads her to return to her marital home. This time, with open eyes.

Akani believes he has married close to the perfect girl. But when he quits his job to start a company and his wife becomes the main breadwinner, he notices that he has become a junior partner in what used to be a relationship of equals. Unable to deal with this state of affairs, he leaves home. Family intervention leads him back home to his wife and just when he thinks he can safely balance his loving life at home and the secret his wife knows nothing about, tragedy strikes.

Then on a rainy Johannesburg evening, Owami meets Akani and they both fall hopelessly in love. An intense relationship begins between the two and whatever they have found together, no marriage can put asunder. As they shoulder the weighty secrets and emotional baggage of their pasts, they must also weather the storms that threaten to separate them.

Zukiswa Wanner’s fifth novel is a thrilling tale of scorned love, resilience, healing love, retribution, losing yet finding oneself in love, and consequences.