Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary

1985. In a mountain village in Lesotho, a father rages as a mother weeps. Shot dead: their only daughter Rose, a teacher, and her husband Jake, an activist and poet. South Africa’s laws forced them into exile, while hooded gunmen took their lives. Amid the sorrow and commotion of funeral preparations, Rose and her parents’ evolving understanding of their turbulent country and of each other unfolds, always intimately connected with the lives of the women who worked for them. But all has not been lost: there was a survivor of the shooting. Hope.

Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, Jenny Hobbs’s rich, powerful fi rst novel, is a story about ordinary living in extraordinary times and a moving tribute to those who worked to raise a South Africa driven to its knees.