I felt that this would be a book I would like- a South African novel set in recent years. Being familiar with Joberg, I was curious to see what could be done with the setting and timeframe. But I found the pace and material wanting as I read it. I noted all the signposts of things that indicated things were to happen, but it took so long to get there and under-delivered, in my opinion.

It’s ambitious to call your novel Johannesburg, for there are as many versions of this city as there are novels about it. And yet it’s what initially attracted me to this book, and to attend a talk at the South African Book Fair titled Johannesburg: A love story last month. With novelist Niq Mhlongo quizzing several writers about their literary and visceral responses to this city they call home, it included Fiona Melrose as well as Ivan Vladislavić and Harry Kalmer. There is no one singular experience of this city – Melrose spoke about how, as a woman, you are necessarily more careful than a man, there are other threats and that, “You move your body differently in the city, depending on whether you have a car or you’re a pedestrian.”

Vladislavić perceptively pointed out that, “Your experience of this place is dependent on money, how much you have, where you’re living – all of this affects the dynamics of living here.” Kalmer added that the city is in constant change, “The city is in constant change. The Yeoville I lived in twenty, thirty years ago is very different to today.”

And so, to Melrose’s novel, Johannesburg, which presents another version of this city I also call home. What also attracted me to this read was that it is set on December 6 2013: it was that evening that it was announced that Mandela had passed on. The days following his death and the country’s mourning remain bright, clear points in memory, iconic moments in history.

This novel is set in Houghton, near to the Mandela residence, (the Residence). It’s a multi-narrative story too, so we follow several characters as they navigate December 6. In homage and a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, the story is set over a single day, from early morning to night, as preparations for a party are underway.

The novel opens with artist Gin Brandt (Virginia), just home from New York where she lives, having spent nearly two decades there. She’s home to celebrate her mother, Neve’s 80th birthday by throwing her a party, a party the matriarch doesn’t want.

Gin is a stranger to this new Johannesburg: a place where beggars stand at robots, and the landscape changes daily. Her white guilt surges forward as she surveys the scene from her car window: “Gin overtook a wagon and felt the pull of guilt in her stomach. She slowed at the next traffic light and stopped, shaking her head at three men offering pamphlets for cheap ‘leather look’ furniture, sex clinics and a new shoe warehouse, and then the beggar too with his blind friend who shuffled along next to him, guilt bait. A mother with a baby. Another child. So she rolled down the window and dropped some coins from her jacket pocket into the tin cup for the blind man’s friend. And they clattered like gun fire as they fell.”

Gin is calcified by her own demons is not an easy character to like; neither is her mother, equally calcified, wondering at this child of hers – their unease with each other the backbone of their relationship.

Much softer, and more sympathetically drawn are Mercy, the domestic worker in the home, who has been there for years. Also sympathetically drawn is Dudu, a domestic worker in another of the Houghton home. She is a sweet woman burdened by her own guilt and sense of loyalty. And swirling through this vortex is the fully realised character of September, Duduzile’s deformed brother. Duduzile both looks after him, as she has her whole life, and more so after Verloren. In echoes of the Marikana massacre, September was injured in a fictional mining fracas at Verloren. Now dealing not only with his physical disability, but voices and derangement, he begs on a street corner and September makes for an intriguing character. Melrose’s sympathetic and incisive look at him brings him closely to life and evokes our empathy.

There are other voices: there is Peter, the lawyer and Gin’s old beau, still hoping that Gin’s hard exterior might crack and finally let him in. Even the pampered pooch Juni make an appearance and we hear her voice too – which makes for charming writing.

As tensions build, Johannesburg’s stormy weather, with its cloying heat before a storm, runs through the narrative and is a perfect foil to the tension beneath the action. From speculation that Mandela had passed, to Neve and Gin’s discomfort with each other and in themselves, as well as September’s increasingly delusional ravings.

And through it all Melrose paints a portrait of the city, and it is in the many descriptions that Johannesburg springs to life in all its glare. A city that is experienced differently by each character.

As seen by Gin it’s a harsh place that matches her own disappointed, needy mood and character: “Gin could feel a rage building. It needed no origin. … This was a rage that she associated with Johannesburg. She only felt it here. … Johannesburg was the practised master of the endless hustle. It was built on gold. The wheelers, the dealers, the pioneer, frontier town it was always going to be. The drivers, the pedestrians, the constant tap tap tapping on your car window from hawkers and beggars and chancers feigning hunger and destitution and misery, exposed by the headphones and sneakers they wore and by strapping lumps of paper to their backs because a hump means money, and a limp or bent-back sloping shuffle even more. It never changed. The assault of demands.”

Contrast this with a description of September’s: “September had his bread and milk. He stood outside the store and looked up to the sun. The sky began to crease under his gaze. He knew that under it, the city was ripening - its flesh softening and warming. Soon its pulp could be pressed with even the most unwilling thumb. And later, of course, the flies. The king is dead. Long live the king.”

And yet, as the day ends, we come closer to understanding Gin, to feeling sympathy for this woman as events unfold, and the true mourning begins.

Johannesburg is a daring novel, and an intriguing one, playing out a day in the lives of South Africans against the broader panorama of the country’s historical events. And it is also a successful novel – one that invites questions and engagement. At the launch of her novel a few days after the book fair, Melrose commented, “Activism is not without consequence. I’m asking: what is our obligation to the stranger at the gate?”

Whatever the answer, if indeed there is an answer, Johannesburg provides a canvas on which to question and explore it.

The author uses the day of the death of Mandela's death to create a modern-day Mrs Dalloway. Gin is back from New York, preparing a party for her mother's 80th birthday, whilst her former boyfriend, Peter, tries to understand what has happened to his life, and a young disabled man gradually loses his sanity protesting outside Peter's building. I suspect there are lots of echoes of Mrs Dalloway here - I don't know the novel well enough to really appreciate them, I think. Melrose uses the Gin character to talk about the difficulties of leaving a place, returning, being yourself.

Fiona Melrose is back less than a year after her much lauded debut novel was released – and this story couldn’t be more different than the last. In Midwinter we followed the tale of a Suffolk farmer and his son as they tried to live through their grief and find peace. This time we’re in Johannesburg where Gin has just returned home from New York to throw a party for her mother’s eightieth birthday.

But this isn’t just a mother and daughter rather than father and sone tale, woven through this are other people’s stories – that of a homeless hunchback fighting for justice and his sister, a man still haunted by his first love, and the domestic workers who populate the neighbourhood.

The whole story takes place on one day – the day the Mandela family prepares to announce Tata Mandela’s death.

I was privileged to see Fiona Melrose at the very first launch affair for this book which was held in my friends bookshop in Woodbridge (read more about the story of that bookshop here). She talked about how this book was inspired by Mrs Dalloway and started as an exercise but it’s clear that certain characters needed their voices to be heard and refused to let her leave the story there.

Strangely the only thing I felt could have been better about this book was the voices – it’s told from several different perspectives and some of the voices were too similar to one another which sometimes left me a little confused as to who I was hearing from. That eased out by halfway through the book though.

The rest is excellent, a mix of the personal and the political written so realistically you can smell the dust and the scent of Agapanthus around you as you read. Personally I prefer it to Mrs Dalloway, partially because it deals with today’s issues but partly because the writing is more fluid and passionate.

4 Bites

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews -even when we know the authors personally and think they’re utterly lovely!

Fiona Melrose's novel Midwinter was one of my favourite novels of last year and Johannesburg is another excellent novel from her. Her writing in Johannesburg is quietly understated, expertly examining relationships and the emotions and turmoil they create. Probably like many people I have heard vague things about crime and violence in Johannesburg and this novel doesn't brush over the reality of living in a city known for it's carjackings and robberies, at least in the past. I also really enjoyed discovering tips of the hat to Mrs Dalloway, which occured often enough to remind me that this is an homage, but not a copy. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5 for the beautiful writing and my favourite character Neve, who's a bit of a bitch!

Johannesburg is set over one day in the titular city: the day that Nelson Mandela's death is announced. The book explores the impact of the man and his death on several of the city's residents. It is the story of Gin, recently returned from New York to host a party for her 80 year old mother's birthday. It is also the story of this mother, Neve, and the story of her domestic help, Mercy. Juno, Neve's dog, also has a story line in here. The book opens with another of the characters whose story is followed over the day: September, homeless, disabled and damaged physically and mentally by having been shot in a workers' rights demonstration. HIs sister, Dudu, is another important character in the tale and finally there is Peter, white liberal lawyer. The characters are well constructed and the tales are well balanced. The day in Johannesburg looks realistically at contemporary South Africa and the legacy of apartheid. The reader is taken inside the heads of all the characters, including Juno, the dog - we read of their hopes, fears and rationalisations for action. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and on the strength of reading it will now seek out Fiona Melrose's first novel, Midwinter.
What I have written above is a review of Johannesburg on the surface level. However it was not possible to avoid the fact that the book had been written as a homage to Virginia Woolf, in particular to her novel Mrs Dalloway. As such it is a beautifully written contemporary reworking, in structure, plot and characters. It is not necessary to know Mrs Dalloway to appreciate Johannesburg but a reading of the former will further enhance appreciation of the latter and of the author's success in her homage. This homage goes further than Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and there is much to recognise in Johannesburg taken from the ideas in Woolf's A Room of One's Own. A lovely book overall which will merit re-reading.

Last year I read Fiona Melrose’s first book ‘Midwinter’. I loved that book, so when I received a review request for Fiona’s new book ‘Johannesburg’ I knew I wanted to read this book. And don’t you just love the cover of Fiona Melrose’s book?! I think they are magnificent.

‘Johannesburg’ takes place at December 6th 2013 and is centered around the lives of several different characters. Why December 6th? On that day Nelson Mandela's family prepares to announce Tata Mandela's death. And in Johannesburg we read about the moments in a view persons lives.

Well, I finished reading this book over a week ago and somehow I just wasn’t able to write this review earlier. I always try to write my reviews as soon as I finish a book, but with this one I just couldn’t. Since I loved ‘Midwinter’ I really hoped to love ‘Johannesburg’ as much, but I didn’t. Not because the writing was bad or something. No Fiona Melrose’s writing was just as good in this book, as in her first. But I just couldn’t connect to all the different characters.

In ‘Johannesburg’ we read about the life of several characters. And just like I always do, I had a lot of trouble separating all the different characters, especially in the beginning. I re-started reading this book two times, but still I found it hard to keep everyone apart. And in the end I just couldn’t connect to all the characters as much as I would have liked.

This book was definitely a nice read, but not as great as I would have liked.

This compelling and ultimately tragic novel takes place over one day in contemporary Johannesburg in 2013, the day on which Nelson Mandela’s death was announced. Through the experiences of a disparate group of characters – a lawyer, domestic staff, a homeless man, and Gin and her mother – we see a portrait of a city and its divided community and explore the vast gulf that still exists between rich and poor in post-apartheid South Africa. Gin has returned from New York to mark her mother's 80th birthday and is preoccupied with preparations for the party. As tension mounts for the celebration, tension also mounts with the arrival of mourners at Mandela’s house, just up the road, and with the wanderings of September, the homeless man, as he continues with his mission to demand justice for the shooting of miners in an earlier incident. All these strands are brought together in a bleak and heart-breaking story that I found thought-provoking, moving and always engaging.
I’ve seen many references to Mrs Dalloway as the inspiration for this book, but I don’t get it. Apart from the fact that it’s set on a single day and involves a party, the focus isn’t on a single protagonist but incorporates a range of characters and experiences. I feel the comparison is somewhat misleading and that this excellent novel needs no referral back to Woolf.

Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘Johannesburg’ is set in Johannesburg, South Africa and follows a cast of characters as they go about their day on December 6, 2013—the day Tata Mandela died.

Having enjoyed Melrose’s debut novel, ‘Midwinter,’ I was even more eager for ‘Johannesburg’ seeing as how it’s inspired by one of my favorite classic novelists. While Melrose’s wonderful writing more then exceed my expectations, the novel did fall short of a few things.

Unlike ‘Mrs. Dalloway,’ ‘Johannesburg’ doesn’t have the fluidity of thought that made Mrs. Dalloway unique. Not only did having too many characters hinder my connection to all of them but the breaks between each of their narratives happened far too abruptly. Every time I finally settled into a character’s mindset, I felt annoyance at having to switch again in just a few paragraphs. Some characters we meet, like Gin or Dudu, had a particularly strong presence and I would’ve been more happy just reading from their perspective instead of switching to some of the less interesting ones like Peter (who was frankly as exhausting as the Peter we see in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway).

The novel’s strength lies in it’s language entirely. ‘Johannesburg’ is written through beautiful, carefully crafted passages such as,

“Frangipani, clusters of sugary stars, so clean and waxy it was if they had been cut from sheets of confectioners icing. Gin touched a single petal. They were real. They were high above her so that she had to strict up through the pointed leaves and the noble branches to reach a stem. She had brought paper with her, knowing that as she cut the stem they would hemorrhage their milk in torrents. Blinking against the sun, trying not to lose a single flower from the spray, she cut. The milk flowed, it dipped along her hand and down her wrist and round like the cut of a blade. It burned her skin. A beautiful blood-pact with the garden.

Mother’s milk.”

“Dudu liked the walk with her mother and the other women. There was laughing and talking, and sometimes she and the other smaller girls could glimpse the world of secret womanhood. To be a woman it seemed, was to understand so much more of the world through your body, your fibre, and know everything that existed both before and after you. Her hips were her mother’s hips and her grandmother’s and all the mothers before them too. Her hips were wide so that she could carry the full weight, the heritage of her female ancestors, the weight of their sorrow, their joy, their creation. Her hips said, I am strong, I can carry all of the wisdom of all the thousands of women who came before me and make safe the path for all my daughters still to come.”

In the end, I didn’t quite love this book but I did *really* enjoy reading it; it felt like a true treat. And Melrose’s ability to sketch a stunning imagery with such language is the sole reason for why I will continue reading anything she publishes in the future.

Melrose's portrait of Johannesburg succeeds in conveying the emotional and sensory overload of a particular day - the day Nelson Mandela's death was announced. Down the road from his Residence in Johannesburg, Gin has returned from New York to hold an 80th birthday for her mother. Deeply ambivalent about the city, Gin struggles through the day. September wanders onstage and, for me, becomes the heart of the book. Mad, injured, crowned with flowers, Septembers connects the people of Johannesburg, from Mandela, to the miners, to Gin's family and his own.
Johannesburg is written on reflection of Mrs Dalloway, and has made me want to re-read that classic day-in-the-life story by Virginia Woolf to see how closely the parallels run. Worth reading, occasionally clunky and perhaps less revealing of Gin and her mother than I hoped, Johannesburg is an intriguing introduction to this city.

I never thought that moving to China to teach English would mean that my circle of new friends would be almost entirely made up off South Africans. Thankfully thye're utterly lovely people, and getting to know them has also made me more curious about South Africa and its history. We all know Nelson Mandela and now, thanks to the Daily Show, we also know Trevor Noah, but its history and culture were still unknown to me. So when I saw Johannesburg I jumped at the chance to get a sense of this amazing city. Thanks to Corsair and Netgalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Whether it's James Joyce's Ulysses or Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of Vanities, many authors have used fiction to immortalise their cities, to show us the streets they so love or that particular way the light has of hitting the roofs. It's difficult to truly encompass everything a city has to offer in a novel without the author coming across as a tour guide, but Melrose finds a way. Rather than wax lyrical about different buildings or streets, she aims to show the lives lived in Johannesburg. In a way Melrose makes the reader a bird flying over the city, landing here and there before flying off to visit someone else. It gives Johannesburg a distinctly poetic and lyrical quality, both achingly immediate and oddly removed. You have to mine some of the passages for their meaning, consider what it is Melrose is actively trying to tell you, but this effort is worth it in the end.

Johannesburg covers only a single day, but splits its narrative between a set of different characters. Melrose aims to include as many different perspectives into her novel in order to truly bring Johannesburg alive on all its different levels. The day is the 6th of December, 2013, the day Nelson Mandela died. It is also the day of Gin's birthday party for her mother, another day of hard work for domestic workers Mercy and Dudu, another day of protest for the homeless September, and a day on which a dog is lost. Initially it is difficult to see how all these stories work together and occasionally you do get confused as to who is speaking, whose life we are currently observing. The characters I feel got the most time were Gin and September, drastically different but both with their own kind of burden to bear. I would have loved to hear more of Mercy and Dudu, who I thought were amazing characters and had a lot of interesting insights into their city and country. Whether I know more about South Africa now I can't really say, but Melrose does infuse her novel with the kind of spirit I have seen in my friends as well, with the difficult but passionate love they have for their country.

Melrose has a talent for describing a larger scene and then zooming in on a surprising detail. A clear example of this is the style of the novel. Most of Johannesburg is written in third person, allowing the reader to both get close to the characters while maintaining something of a distance. Occasionally, however, Melrose dips into a first-person narrative to share her characters' most intimate fears and thoughts. It was towards the end I truly started to understand Johannesburg as an 'homage to Virginia Woold's Mrs. Dalloway'. Melrose lets her characters' thoughts ramble in a way that initially seems odd. I mean, why dedicate so much time to things that are seemingly pointless? It isn't until later, when the reader has spent more time with the characters, that this writing pays off because we can see what it is these characters obsess about, can't help but think about and even prefer not to think about. Many things are hinted at but not really developed and at the end of the novel you don;t necessarily know much more about any of the characters. The ending is not typical and may leave some readers a bit unsatisfied, but I enjoyed the elegiac nature of it.

Reading Johannesburg was a very interesting experience. Melrose shows you the day in the lives of many different people and rather than pass judgement or explain, she leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions. Her love for Johannesburg shines through, however, and that is the real heart and soul of the novel.

Gin returns to Johannesburg from New York to hold a birthday party for her 80 year old mother. Her timing is perfect - she returns on the day that Nelson Mandela's death is announced, and the nation starts pouring out its grief, its pain and also celebrating with many wreaths, flowers, candles and pilgrimages his wonderful life and inspiring legacy.

It's a party, and of course we meet cantankerous Mrs. Brandt. But also Mercy, the domestic helper, and Dudu her friend. September, the miner from Marikana, Peter, Gin's ex, and Juno - the family pet - all feature.

Set on this single momentous day in Johannesburg Gin's past and future, her supporters and detractors, her family with all its faults collide, and no one is the same after that.

Here's an example of the beautiful writing:

"Some of the platters had thin cracks no wider than an ant's foot. Mercy ran her fingers across the fault lines. She liked how they felt and liked too the confidence she had that they would not break. The older things had a strength to them that the newer stuff did not. The same was true of women and girls. Mercy's own daughters worried her. So here, so there and always more money and more things and no work."

The characters were somewhat bare. Not that they weren't well developed, more that they were distilled to their essence. And this skill of the author's for distillation pervaded the whole little book. In Johannesburg, thunderstorms and hail batter tree lined gardens, filled with roses tended by gentle hands, hardened through years of pain. Eyes that meet at traffic lights that glance away - some guilt, more pain. It's all there, but never over told. It's so very real.

This book resonated with my soul in a true reading experience. I know that Fiona Melrose gets Johannesburg, like I do. And I hope that all my friends read this. They won't all get it. But those who do will look at me, and we'll know. We do.

"Johannesburg is a profound hymn to an extraordinary city, and a devastating personal and political manifesto on love". Read it.

The novel, Johannesburg, takes place during a single day, the day of Nelson Mandela's death. This landmark event is not the focus of the novel, but is a constant refrain in the background of all that occurs. The story contains a range of amazing characters, including a highly strung artist, returning from overseas to Johannesburg, the city of her birth, trying to gain favour and recognition from her cantankerous mother; a homeless man who has been a victim of apartheid and is peacefully protesting against the injustices wrought; the homeless man's sister who cares for him as best she can while fulfilling her domestic duties in the home of people who epitomise the colour divide of the apartheid era; and many more. All of the characters are well developed and their emotions and observations so well described that the reader experiences and lives through the events of the day along with each one of them. That which is beautiful and not so beautiful about the city of Johannesburg, its politics and history, form the backdrop of the events that occur. This is a beautifully written novel. Highly recommended. Thanks to Little, Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for the ARC.

This novel brings together the stories of a number of residents or former residents of Johannesburg, telling about each of their lives through detailed description of their activities and thoughts throughout the day and through flashbacks to previous events in their lives. In the first few chapters, a lot of characters are introduced very quickly, many of whom seem to have little relationship to each other, but eventually all their tales are pulled in to intersect.

The writing is good but I found many of the characters lacking spirit. Gin and her mother are the products of two generations with differing ideas of what defines success. I think more should have been made more of the maids, Mercy and Dudu. September was the most interesting character to me: he has some mental health issues as the result of an injury sustained in a union riot as well as a birth defect. The relationship between him and his sister, Dudu, is touching. Peter, Gin's ex who still pines for her, is simply tedious and I, like Gin, just wished he go away. And Juno - well, Juno is the dog, and part of the story is told from Juno's perspective; I personally found this twee and childish, and not in keeping with the literary tone of the rest of the novel.

The connections between the various characters' plot-lines are mostly incidental, rather than each triggering events in the lives of the others. There is no one main plot or one main character, so the story seems to lack a certain focus. I felt as though I'd been circling around a series of short stories. Although all of the events occur on the day of Mandela's death, very little, if any, of the plot relies on that. Apart from the many references to characters hearing the news on the radio, or having fleeting thoughts about Mandela, all of the stories could have happened on any day.

I think I'd have preferred to read a book in which these characters' stories were told in a more substantial way with more examination of the events in their lives, less on their rambling thoughts and less of the mundane details (do we really need, for example, an entire paragraph about the hotel toiletries in the shower?)

At first the multiple narratives in this book seemed interesting and quirky, especially the passages written from the point of view of Juno the little dog. As the book went on (and on and on) I found myself less enchanted with the style of writing and getting confused by which character was who. Due to the lack of detail given to characters the reader does not ever get to fully connect with any one character.

After reading the blurb for this book I expected to know more about Gin before the book ended, but Gin's character didn't seem to be in the forefront. I still have no idea about Gin after this book came to a pretty abrupt ending.

I did not feel satiated after finishing this book.

I thoroughly enjoyed Johannesburg by Fiona Smith. Set in its eponymous city on the day of Nelson Mandela's passing, it intertwines the stories of an expat home to throw a party for her mother's 80th birthday, that mother, their housekeeper, their dog, the daughter's former boyfriend, a labor lawyer, an injured former employee of the mine company, and others. We watch each of their respective days unfold and then how their lives intersect. All the while, how they interact with the city, with each other and with their pasts develops each character so that we know them all deeply. The twists and turns cover internal struggles as well as the touching on the state of race in modern day South Africa. By the end of the short novel, I cared deeply for the individuals and understood their interactions, perhaps more than they themselves did since I was exposed to their inner dialogues. Highly recommend this excellent read!

In a series of nods to Virginia Woolf and ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Fiona Melrose gives us a devastating portrait of loneliness and alienation set in modern South Africa over the course of one day, the day Nelson Mandela’s death is announced.

The main character, Virginia ‘Gin’, railing against conformity to post-colonial white expectation of a woman - marriage, children, social conventions - long ago decamped to pursue an artistic career in New York. She has returned to Johannesburg to arrange a party to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday and to prove that, despite her shortcomings in her mother’s eyes, she is in fact a caring, capable person, worthy of her mother’s esteem, even her love. Her fault, if it is indeed one, has been to seek the life she wants, ‘a room of her own’ in cosmopolitan NY. Two quotes that struck me in particular (taken from the pre-publication proof copy):

‘Her whole life a series of excursions and lurches and queries trying to get back to who she was before she was marked as a girl, exiled from that genderless place where all of her, boundless, limitless, was possible.’

‘Why do things (clothes, words, people) that make sense in one place and not in another, never quite make the translation? Here at home, Gin never felt she was enough and that this place was never enough for her. That she was at the same time diminished by it and too good for it. How these two states of being ran alongside each other, two rails raced off into forever, never meeting. She felt tears rise.’

Her mother, too, has achieved her lifelong dream of a space of her own, but in her case because everyone she had to share it with in the past has gone. She doesn’t at all want to open her doors to birthday party guests. The atmosphere starts out tense and tetchy, the pace of the action is well considered and a feeling of foreboding builds up steadily - all terrifically well written.

Running concurrently are the experiences of Gin’s former boyfriend Peter, the company man with a conscience and a man too thin-skinned to connect with a woman like Gin, who regards him with disdain. He and the other characters all intersect on this one day to a greater or lesser extent with the sad, sad story of September, destitute and alienated by his physical and mental disfigurement, all set in the brutal, but still beautiful, city of Mandela-era Johannesburg. On the day of Mandela’s death, and with undercurrents of despair and suicide throughout the narrative, we fear its people are in jeopardy.

A bleak and emotionally draining novel that has stayed on my mind long after the last page. On the strength of this one, I’ll seek out Fiona Melrose’s first book ‘Midwinter’ as soon as I can.

*I’ll publish this review on goodreads.com nearer to publication date, many thanks for the opportunity to read this as an ARC.*