ISBN 978-1- 946395-03- 0 | paperback | $15.95 | publication date Aug 2018
Winner, Aidoo-Snyder Book Award
Winner, SALA Nadine Gordimer Award for Short Stories
In her debut collection of short fiction, Reneilwe Malatji invites us into the intimate lives of South African women—their whispered conversations, their love lives, their triumphs and heartbreaks. This diverse chorus of voices recounts misadventures with love, family, and community in powerful stories woven together with anger, politics, and wit. Malatji crafts an engaging collection full of rich, memorable characters who navigate work, love, patriarchy, and racism with thoughtfulness, strength, and humor.
Read an excerpt from Love Interrupted | Love Interrupted Reading Guide (PDF)
Praise for Love interrupted
“The book gives a nuanced glimpse into women’s lives a world away from many of us, but those women could, in many ways, be women anywhere. […] Their authenticity allows the stories to connect women’s experiences while showcasing the strength and resiliency of women in a system built against them. […] [A] beautiful and poignant story collection.”— Shelf Unbound
“The unsentimental style of these stories packs an emotional punch as they examine post-apartheid patriarchy through the eyes of various observant black women characters.” — Foreword Reviews
“Many readers will see themselves in—and find themselves rooting for—the women in Malatji’s solid debut.”— Kirkus
A baby born the wrong color; a college graduate whose African family cannot be seated at a restaurant full of Whites; a man who smashes his Audi through his garage door, killing all his valuable assets in the process. The stories in Reneilwe Malatji’s Love Interrupted peel back the gloss from atop South Africa’s ‘Black Diamonds’ to reveal the sedimentary layers of truth in the lives of these model middle-class families: each story inventively unfurls a different desire, longing, or frustration. In the paired stories “A Young Girl’s Dream” and “It’s My Turn to Eat,” we find Lebo, a former domestic whose aspirations have led her to own a construction company with a contract from the Department of Transport. We find, when Lebo is caught in the crosshairs at her own elaborate party, that “the scars of her difficult childhood remain, denying her complete happiness and peace.” The stories of Love, Interrupted are just like this, haunting you with their statements about the world of South Africa’s middle class long after you’ve finished reading. —Jacinda Townsend, author Saint Monkey
“This book is a treasure. A beautifully written book by a new author, who has powerfully captured the stories of African women, daughters, sons, and lovers in her first collection.”–
“Malatji’s characters are funny, moving, and gripping as they navigate the everyday. Love, here, is always messy, always knotted, and always interrupted. The stories vary in range… They explore representations of gender, sexuality and domestic violence grounded in the histories of their experience and the context of their everyday. Engaging with ways of writing race, class and wealth, and subtly tracing the connections between rural and urban, the range of this collection is broad and its themes pertinent. It reminds us of the necessity of keeping these dialogues open, and ensuring multiple voices are heard.” — Africa in Words
The Author
Reneilwe Malatji was born in South Africa in 1968. She grew up in Turfloop township, in the northern part of South Africa, during the era of apartheid. Her father was an academic and her mother was a school teacher. Malatji trained as a teacher and worked as a subject specialist and advisor to provincial education departments. She recently completed a post-graduate diploma in Journalism and an MA in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She works as a lecturer at the University of Limpopo in South Africa and has an adult son. Love interrupted is her first book.