CATALYST PRESS
LOVE INTERRUPTED
ISBN 978-1-946395-03-0 | paperback | $15.95 | publication date Aug 2018
Sisters, friends, aunts, mothers, daughters, grandmothers, mothers-in-law
In her debut collection of short fiction, Reneilwe Malatji invites us into the intimate lives of South African women—their whispered conversations, their love lives, their triumphs and heartbreaks. This diverse chorus of voices recounts misadventures with love, family, and community in powerful stories woven together with anger, politics, and wit. Malatji crafts an engaging collection full of rich, memorable characters who navigate work, love, patriarchy, and racism with thoughtfulness, strength, and humor.
REVIEWS
A baby born the wrong color; a college graduate whose African family cannot be seated at a restaurant full of Whites; a man who smashes his Audi through his garage door, killing all his valuable assets in the process. The stories in Reneilwe Malatji’s Love Interrupted peel back the gloss from atop South Africa’s ‘Black Diamonds’ to reveal the sedimentary layers of truth in the lives of these model middle-class families: each story inventively unfurls a different desire, longing, or frustration. In the paired stories “A Young Girl’s Dream” and “It’s My Turn to Eat,” we find Lebo, a former domestic whose aspirations have led her to own a construction company with a contract from the Department of Transport. We find, when Lebo is caught in the crosshairs at her own elaborate party, that “the scars of her difficult childhood remain, denying her complete happiness and peace.” The stories of Love nterrupted are just like this, haunting you with their statements about the world of South Africa’s middle class long after you’ve finished reading. —Jacinda Townsend, author Saint Monkey
“The unsentimental style of these stories packs an emotional punch as they examine post-apartheid patriarchy through the eyes of various observant black women characters.” —Foreword Reviews
“Many readers will see themselves in—and find themselves rooting for—the women in Malatji’s solid debut.” —Kirkus
Reneilwe Malatji was born in South Africa in 1968. She grew up in Turfloop township, in the northern part of South Africa, during the era of apartheid. Her father was an academic and her mother was a school teacher. Malatji trained as a teacher and worked as a subject specialist and advisor to provincial education departments. She recently completed a post-graduate diploma in Journalism and an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She works as a lecturer at the University of Limpopo in South Africa and has an adult son. Love interrupted is her first book.
AUTHOR RENEILWE MALATJI
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