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Winner of the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing, 2019

Coming out in South Africa ... At what cost?

All his life Kabelo Mosala has been the perfect child to his doting absent parents, who show him off every chance they get. Both his parents and his small community look forward to him coming back after medical school and joining his father's practice. They also plan to give him the perfect township wedding. But Kabelo's one wish has always been to get as far away from the township as he possibly can and never come back. A few weeks before he leaves for university, however, he forms a close bond with Sediba, one of his childhood friends, confirming his long-held suspicion that he is gay. Their relationship is thrown into turmoil by social pressures and conflicting desires, and it starts to look as if they can't be together. But against all odds the two young men make their way back to each other, risking scorn from the community that raised them.

In her characteristic, beautifully modulated voice, with razor-sharp clarity, Kagiso Lesego Molope tackles an urgent issue in her country of birth.

From WATER STREET PRESS At the age of 21, Gus Weesfree witnessed a brutal crime in his hometown of Tradition, Ohio, and fled. Now an old man, exhausted by a life on the run, he is compelled to confront his past only to find most of his memories buried by urban sprawl. He seeks solace in Mabel, the sister he abandoned, a lifelong alcoholic who presumed him dead. As the surviving Weesfree family exhumes their history, Gus finds that not all was as it seemed in Tradition. The love and betrayal of his youth ran far deeper than he ever imagined. Moving seamlessly between present-day and the 1930s and '40s, award-winning author Marci Blackman reveals the powerful force exerted by the past on the present. Tradition gracefully uncovers the Weesfree family secrets-and how race, family, and loyalty can shape a life.