An important rumination on youth in modern-day South Africa, this haunting debut novel tells the story of two extraordinary young women who have grown up black in white suburbs and must now struggle to find their identities. The rich and pampered Ofilwe has taken her privileged lifestyle for granted, and must confront her swiftly dwindling sense of culture when her soulless world falls apart. Meanwhile, the hip and sassy Fiks is an ambitious go-getter desperate to leave her vicious past behind for the glossy sophistication of city life, but finds Johannesburg to be more complicated and unforgiving than she expected. These two stories artfully come together to illustrate the weight of history upon a new generation in South Africa.
Kopano Matlwa Mabaso is a South African author whose bestselling, prize-winning debut, Coconut, was written when she was twenty-one years old and went on to win the European Union Literary Award and was joint winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her second novel, Spilt Milk, was published to high acclaim. Matlwa was selected for the 21 Icons project, recognizing young game changers in South Africa, and in 2015 she won the Aspen Ideas Award for medical innovation. She is a Rhodes Scholar and a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford.
An important rumination on youth in modern-day South Africa, this haunting debut novel tells the story of two extraordinary young women who have grown up black in white suburbs and must now struggle to find their identities. The rich and pampered Ofilwe has taken her privileged lifestyle for granted, and must confront her swiftly dwindling sense of culture when her soulless world falls apart. Meanwhile, the hip and sassy Fiks is an ambitious go-getter desperate to leave her vicious past behind for the glossy sophistication of city life, but finds Johannesburg to be more complicated and unforgiving than she expected. These two stories artfully come together to illustrate the weight of history upon a new generation in South Africa.
Kopano Matlwa Mabaso is a South African author whose bestselling, prize-winning debut, Coconut, was written when she was twenty-one years old and went on to win the European Union Literary Award and was joint winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her second novel, Spilt Milk, was published to high acclaim. Matlwa was selected for the 21 Icons project, recognizing young game changers in South Africa, and in 2015 she won the Aspen Ideas Award for medical innovation. She is a Rhodes Scholar and a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford.
This sparkling image depicts a small section of the Carina Nebula, one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most-imaged objects. The Carina Nebula, NGC 3372, is an enormous cloud of gas and dust home to several massive and bright stars, including at least a dozen that are 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun.
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