There’s nothing quite like a writer setting out their stall from the first page of a book so you know what you’re getting. When Karen Jennings – the South African author whose last novel, An Island, was deservedly longlisted for the Booker prize in 2021 – opens her new novel with a woman crouching over a mixing bowl to expel urine as “dark as cough syrup”, we know it will not be a feelgood comedy.
The woman is 53-year-old Deidre van Deventer, and she is in a bad way – but then so is the world. It’s the late 2020s and Cape Town is living under drought conditions (presumably inspired by the city’s Day Zero water crisis of 2018). The drought is not intrinsic to the story, but it affords an intensification of Deidre’s character traits: her laziness in not washing, her selfishness in using money sent by her estranged daughter not for water but for “takeaways and booze”.
