Ready to read novel not quite like anything you’ve read before?
Richard Nevis, an ex-lawyer turned ship-restorer who also volunteers at a tokoloshe sanctuary is pulled into a dark and mysterious adventure surrounding a mystical African box of undetermined power. He and Lun, the tokoloshe he befriends, are being hunted by both a criminal mastermind and a villainous vulture, and they’re going to need all the help they can get. (And they’re going to get it from two crime-fighting midwives with a penchant for martial arts). Throw in a sleek bibliophilic assassin and a couple of other weird and wonderful characters (of both the human and non-human variety), and you’ve got one of the most intriguing and original novels to be published in South Africa in possibly forever.
It’s fantasy, of course. But fantasy grounded in very real South African landscapes and emotional authenticity, and fantasy unlike local readers would have encountered before. Andrew Salomon, writing his first novel for adults, uses African folklore in a completely original and quirky way. Written in light, buoyant prose, the story is fast-paced and extremely readable, picking you up its warm and thrilling embrace and not letting you go until the electrifying climax.
The action starts off in Cape Town and takes the reader all the way to Nieu-Bethesda, famous for the hauntingly strange Owl House. I have always thought Nieu-Bethesda would be a wonderful place to set a novel, surrounded as it is by the vast Karoo nothingness, and infected with its own sinister history, yet charming and tranquil, and Andrew Salomon captures the little Eastern Cape Town wonderfully. His Cape Town is enchantingly rendered, too.
The dialogue can be a little contrived at times, and clichés lurk around some of the corners, but ultimately these flaws are forgivable in the face of a wonderful story.
Tokoloshe Song was shortlisted for the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award and is currently competing for top prize in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel awards. It looks like we’ve got a venerable hit on our hands, folks.
