What is Bianca Marais reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don’t Know the Words.

Her entry begins:

I’ve just finished reading What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky, a short story collection by Lesley Nneka Arimah. I don’t usually read short stories, mainly because I find that just as I become invested in the characters, the story’s over, but since I grew up in South Africa, I really love African stories and the author writes a lot about Nigeria where she spent some time in her youth....[read on]

About Hum If You Don’t Know the Words, from the publisher:

Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy.

Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband’s death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred…until the Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built, and shatters their worlds when Robin’s parents are left dead and Beauty’s daughter goes missing.

After Robin is sent to live with her loving but irresponsible aunt, Beauty is hired to care for Robin while continuing the search for her daughter. In Beauty, Robin finds the security and family that she craves, and the two forge an inextricable bond through their deep personal losses. But Robin knows that if Beauty finds her daughter, Robin could lose her new caretaker forever, so she makes a desperate decision with devastating consequences. Her quest to make amends and find redemption is a journey of self-discovery in which she learns the harsh truths of the society that once promised her protection.

Told through Beauty and Robin’s alternating perspectives, the interwoven narratives create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid-era South Africa. Hum If You Don’t Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

Visit Bianca Marais's website.

The Page 69 Test: Hum If You Don’t Know the Words.

Writers Read: Bianca Marais.

--Marshal Zeringue