CATALYST PRESS
UNMAKING GRACE
ISBN 978-1-946395-23-8 | trade paper | $16.00 | publication date Jan 2020
Featured in Ms. Magazine‘s ‘Reads for the Rest of Us’ column.
Winner, 2017 Debut Prize, University of Johannesburg Prizes for South African writing
Long-listed, Sunday Times (South Africa) Literary Award
Family secrets run deep for Grace, a young girl growing up in Cape Town during the 1980s. Her family secrets spill over into adulthood, and threaten to ruin the respectable life she has built for herself.
When an old childhood friend emerges after disappearing a decade earlier during a clash with apartheid riot police in the Cape Flats, where South Africa’s coloured community makes its home, Grace’s memories of her childhood come rushing back, and she is confronted, once again, with the loss that has shaped her. She has to face up to the truth or continue to live a lie—but the choice is not straightforward. Unmaking Grace is an intimate portrayal of violence, both personal and political, and its legacy on one person’s life. It meditates on the long shadow cast by personal trauma, showing the inter-generational imprint of violence and loss on people’s lives.
REVIEWS
“The novel creates drama while confronting intersecting systemic oppressions and intergenerational trauma by foregrounding its characters’ needs, wants, wounds, and aspirations. The prose is taut with both clarity and complexity. A smart, compassionate portrayal of one woman’s quest to end the cycle of violence.” —Kirkus Reviews
“A bold rendering of the swathes of emotional terrain that lie between victim and abuser, child and adult, husband and wife, good and bad, past and present—a deeply compelling and important story.” —Yewande Omotoso, author of Bom Boy and The Woman Next Door
“Barbara Boswell’s Unmaking Grace is a novel of constant questioning. Moving and thought-provoking, the narrative takes the reader on a journey of becoming not only for the country, South Africa, but also for the women who struggle for a sense of themselves.” —Merle Collins, author of Angel and The Ladies Are Upstairs
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Barbara Boswell is an educator and literary activist. She is an alumna of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she lived for several years, and has taught at universities in both the USA and South Africa. Barbara is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Cape Town, where she teaches Black women’s diasporic literature, African feminist literary theory, and gender and sexuality.
AUTHOR BARBARA BOSWELL
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