Afghan Women

SCATTERLINGS

Manenzhe, Rešoketšwe HarperVia (288 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 13, 2022 978-0-063-26411-3

In 1927, when “illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives” in South Africa is prohibited by the Immorality Act, the van Zijl family’s fate turns tragic. South African writer Manenzhe’s debut looks back to an especially cruel moment in history when sexual relations between Blacks and Whites were pronounced unlawful, threatening prison for the adults involved. Such is the situation for Abram van Zijl, who’s White, and his “black and English” wife, Alisa, who are parents to two daughters, Dido and Emilia. One horrific decision by Alisa shatters the family early in the book, and it’s her psychology, history, and choices that dominate the story and set the tone. Born the daughter of a slave in Jamaica, orphaned when young, she was adopted by a kindly White man who brought her to England. Alienated and haunted by her birth father and the stories he told her before he died, Alisa has always felt herself unloved, unrooted, condemned to a “legacy of wandering and melancholy.” She travels tirelessly, eventually heading to Africa, sensing she might trace her origins there, but onboard ship she meets Abram, of Dutch and English heritage, and instead discovers a love that will bring her a home and family. Over time, however, the relationship fades, and Alisa’s unsatisfied need for connection returns, but now the external world is poised to intervene. 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. There are loose ends—questions about Alisa that are not fully answered by long extracts from her journals included in the text. The result is a choppy story of long-endured, compounded oppression. Its closing chapters allow a suggestion of peace, but not for all.

An elegiac view of colonial and racial injustice.

THE WHISPERING DEAD

Mark, David Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Dec. 6, 2022 978-0-7278-5055-3

No matter how deeply buried, some secrets have a way of coming uncomfortably to light. A brooding, evocative prologue set in 1968 introduces young Cordelia Hemlock, restlessly staring at a joyless gray sea as she stands on the verge of a consequential career with MI6. The story then jumps to 2016, which finds Cordelia comfortably retired, living in the north of England, and meeting journalist Paolo Fergus, who’s recently posted a blistering exposé about death squads in Belize, the threat of revolution in Guatemala in the 1980s, and the involvement of MI6 therein. The puzzle pieces that explain the crimes he’s reported fall progressively into place through alternating narratives from shrewd, quickthinking Cordelia, writing in Guatemala in 1983, and hapless, middle-aged Felicity Goose, offering a different perspective via transcript in 2016. After Felicity and her husband, John, have been inexplicably taken prisoner not far from Cordelia’s current home, John has the unenviable task of explaining his covert past as a spy working with Cordelia to his wife. On one level, the subtly layered novel is a study in contrasts. Mark gets maximum mileage from the disparity between his two female leads. Cordelia responds to threats with cool calculation; Felicity is understandably distraught—until she comes to display a firm resolve reminiscent of the veteran spy. Simmering beneath the twisty plot are questions about ethics, colonialism, and misogyny that add relevance and raise the novel above many of its familiar spy-story tropes.

A brisk, astute espionage thriller with a compelling moral core.

DECEMBER BREEZE

Moreno, Marvel Trans. by Isabel Adey & Charlotte Coombe Europa Editions (484 pp.) $17.99 paper | Nov. 15, 2022 978-1-60945-802-7

Barranquilla, Colombia, may have spawned a legendary group of male writers in the middle of the last century— Gabriel García Márquez included—but young women living there did not enjoy an equally magical time.

Moreno, an associate of García Márquez and the famed “Barranquilla Group,” delivers a comprehensive indictment of the conditions facing woman in that coastal Colombian city in the 1950s. Related from the point of view of the preternaturally observant Lina, who’s looking back on her hometown from an expatriate life in Paris, the novel focuses on the experiences of three young women—Dora, Catalina, and Beatriz—exposing the city’s sexual violence, misogyny, classism, and racism in sharp and unrelenting detail. Railroaded or goaded into marriages and relationships that rarely served to benefit their own sexual or financial interests, the three women experience varying degrees of disenchantment or outright self-destruction in the process. Shadowy Lina, whose life experiences seem to echo some of Moreno’s own, relates the advice and admonitions dispensed by a chorus of older women, her aunts and a grandmother, who have seen all the harms done by generations of men gone before. Each young woman’s story is told with elaborate attention to her history and lineage and those of the men who ensnare and inveigle her into nightmarish alliances. Patience is required to discern the interlocking web of family and professional connections within the provincial city, and the detail with which Moreno traces who wound up where, when, and with whom