Bosadi

Kopano Matlwa is back in full force with a haunting, unforgettable novel that deals with love, loss and the unbearable weight of womanhood in a world that insists on forgetting us. Naledi is a woman unravelling slowly, painfully, purposefully. Once full of promise, her life has shrunk into the claustrophobic walls of a home that no longer feels safe, with a husband whose love has curdled into something dark and dangerous. Between Instagrammable scones, lockdown picnics and a nursery that remains heartbreakingly empty, Naledi wages a quiet war against erasure of her name, her dreams, her body and her sanity. Aunty, the quiet force in the shadows of Naledi’s crumbling marriage, carries her own scars. A Zimbabwean domestic worker with a fierce devotion to the children she left behind, Aunty watches, waits and bears witness. Between the two women, a fragile sisterhood grows – tender, complicated and not without its betrayals. Told in alternating voices, Bosadi is a devastating exploration of gender, grief, immigration, violence and the impossible expectations that swallow Black women whole. In prose that is at once lyrical and poignant, Kopano Matlwa pulls no punches, asking: How do you survive a strange life that everyone insists is normal? What happens when the very thing you prayed for breaks you?

Kopano Matlwa won the 2006/2007 European Union Award for her first novel, Coconut, which went on to become a bestseller and a classic South African novel. Her subsequent novels, Spilt Milk and Period Pain, focus on the ‘Born Free’ generation and address issues of race, class and colonisation. Matlwa won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2010. She holds a medical degree from the University of Cape Town, completed a Master’s in Global Health Science and was awarded a doctorate in Population Health from Oxford University where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She lives in Johannesburg.