I just finished. I need a moment to ponder, to weep, to reminisce…good literature does that to me…

A legacy of love and friendship; a tribute to life’s journeys, and all the complications of love and dedication and commitment involved in undertaking joint projects, involved in messy relationships, of sharing a lifelong passion. Naked and raw and pure. I loved this story. A perfect blending of simplicity and complexity, profound and innocent and full of the commonplace things of the everyday, and the shocking things we encounter that mar and make us along the way.

The timing of the simultaneous storylines, weaving between past and present, is exquisite; the deepest secrets seep through when least expected, and the tragedies and traumas overlap and pile up as time thrusts these marvellous characters into the trials of adulthood.

Where this went by the climax was unexpected and soul-piercing. I had to pause and …

This novel will go on my list of bests without hesitation. This is a novel relevant to every generation in our current culture, an eye on the hidden secrets masked by our small successes, an ear to the unspoken truths we’ve hushed, wrought with the ugliness and selfishness that surrounds and permeates us, and complete with the beauty we become as we are purified by the fires of life’s unfair trials, leading us to perspective, giving us hope for maturity and reason and love.

There are a slew of intoxicating quotes I have kept to think on, but here is my favourite:

‘The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures….the alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it, swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European, a world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own; I hate that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world. And I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don’t exist in that world…´