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Published Dec 2022
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A lyrical, moving novel in the spirit of Transcendent Kingdom and A Burning—and the most awarded debut title in South Africa—that tells the story of a multiracial family when the Immorality Act is passed, revealing the story of one family's scattered souls in the wake of history.
In 1927, South Africa passes the Immorality Act, prohibiting sexual intercourse between "Europeans" (white people) and "natives" (Black people). Those who break the draconian new law face imprisonment—for men of up to five years; for women, four years.
Abram and his wife Alisa have their share of marital problems, but they also have a comfortable life in South Africa with their two young girls. But then the Act is passed. Alisa is black, and their two children are now evidence of their involvement in a union that has been criminalized by the state.
At first, Alisa and Abram question how they'll be affected by the Act, but then officials start asking questions at the girls' school, and their estate is catalogued for potential disbursement. Abram is at a loss as to how to protect his young family from the grinding machinery of the law, whose worst discriminations have until now been kept at bay by the family's economic privilege. And with this, his hesitation, the couple's bond is tattered.
Alisa, who is Jamaican and the descendant of slaves, was adopted by a wealthy white British couple, who raised her as their child. But as she grew older and realized that the prejudices of British society made no allowance for her, she journeyed to South Africa where she met Abram. In the aftermath of the Immorality Act, she comes to a heartbreaking conclusion based on her past and collective history – and she commits her own devastating act, one that will reverberate through their entire family's lives.
Intertwining her storytelling with ritual, myth, and the heart-wrenching question of who stays and who leaves, Scatterlings marks the debut of a gifted storyteller who has become a sensation in her native South Africa—and promises to take the Western literary world by storm as well.
"The stories themselves call to one another across the book in a structure that makes itself apparent only slowly, and in sentences that take their time. Manenzhe's words are full of a wild, roaming intelligence that drifts into both intense philosophical exploration and acknowledgments of the unknowable. Yet the book is a swift, brutal read, full of suspense about the big and small questions of living, struggling with its characters' beliefs about belonging and rootlessness." - V. V. Ganeshananthan, New York Times
"Manenzhe debuts with a poetic and wrenching story of one family's upheaval…the novel feels both grounded and timeless, as Manenzhe fuses this tragedy of South Africa's segregationist policies with a long tradition of folklore. There's great heft to this universal story." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Manenzhe's poetic narrative, sometimes dreamy, piercing, and lyrical, at other times denser, is threaded with heartache and suffering as well as ancestral myth and symbolism...An elegiac view of colonial and racial injustice" – Kirkus Reviews
"There are many aspirants and precious few achievers wishing to emulate the success of Hilary Mantel. Such novels are often in thrall to size, as though to convince the reader that heft equals worthiness. Much historical fiction leaves me cold for this very reason: the idea of wading through a wearisomely large book of relentlessly recondite detail and painstakingly fettled historical pedantry is like being presented with a sandwich where either the bread or the filling is supplied in excess. Manenzhe does well to compact a twentieth-century historical tragedy into 213 pages of supple prose that draws the reader into the sulphurous white nationalist mood that choked South Africa between the wars." - Wamuwi Mbao, The Johannesburg Review of Books
"Elegant, mythical, heart-wrenching, and beautiful, Scatterlings conveys the profound impact of racism on one South African family." - Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, award-winning author of The Revisioners
"Rešoketšwe Manenzhe's writing is exquisite. In Scatterlings, she breathtakingly weaves myth and impossible love with South African politics and history. This is a book to be read and reread." - Ayesha Harruna Attah, author of The Hundred Wells of Salaga and Zainab Takes New York
This information about Scatterlings was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe is a South African villager and storyteller. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Kalahari Review, Fireside Fiction, Lolwe, FIYAH, and the 2017 Sol Plaatjie European Union Anthology, among other outlets. She has won the 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize, the 2020 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, the 2021 Akuko Short Story Competition, the 2021 HSS Award for Best Fiction, the 2021 UJ Prize for South African Fiction in English, the First-Time Author award at the 2021 South African Literary Awards, and she was the first runner-up for the 2019 Collins Elesiro Prize for Fiction. She was shortlisted for the 2021 Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards. She lives in Cape Town.
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