The Boy Next Door
A powerful love story set in post-independence Zimbabwe
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
*Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers*
'Entertaining, ambitious and packed with news from elsewhere, leavened by the precious optimism of youth. Don't miss it.' Independent
A powerful love story set in post-independence Zimbabwe as it slides towards chaos.
'Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbour set his stepmother alight.'
Or so Lindiwe Bishop believes, though eighteen months later the charges against Ian McKenzie are dropped and he returns home, full of charm and swagger. Intrigued, Lindiwe strikes up a covert friendship with the mysterious white boy next door. As a bond grows between them, they cannot foresee how severely it will be tested in the years ahead.
Vividly evoking Zimbabwe's slide from independence into chaos, THE BOY NEXT DOOR tells an engrossing tale about what it means to witness, change, love and remain whole when all around you is falling apart.
'An exuberant, tender and often humorous love story ... Irene Sabatini is a born writer, and she has told a completely engrossing story' Daily Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sabatini debuts with a love story set against the backdrop of Mugabe's Zimbabwe, from its independence in the 1980s to the decline of democracy in the 1990s. Lindiwe Bishop is 14 when her neighbor, 17-year-old Ian McKenzie, is charged with killing his mother. Lindiwe's shy, at the top of her class and from the first black family that settled in Bulawayo after integration. Ian is boisterous, a dropout and from the last white family remaining in the neighborhood. They only meet briefly before he is jailed, and when he's released a year and a half later they strike up a secret friendship that largely consists of Lindiwe listening to Ian talk. Their friendship endures another hiatus this one for 10 years when Ian goes to South Africa, and when the two reconnect, Lindiwe is a spitfire. Subplots of varying interest the question of Ian's fidelity, whether one of Lindiwe's friends is shacking up with corrupt officials crop up, but most lack resolution or are abandoned soon after they're raised. Sabatini's writing is fine and shows the potential in this developing talent.
