David watches the garden boy from his bedroom window. He peers through the bougainvillea, branches pruned to near nakedness, his breath forming asymmetrical shapes on the glass. The boy bends his body towards the earth, churns dark soils with the blunt edge of his spade. Clumps appear in the ground surrounding the rose bushes. Ripples
Choke Chain by Jason Donald has a long emotional reach. Set in 1980’s apartheid South Africa it narrates the Thorne’s dysfunctional family life with clarity and compassion. Domesticity, gender politics and inequality are explored kitchen-sink style in this simmering story where two brothers, Alex, aged twelve, and Kevin, eight, grow up in poverty with an
Elani has grown up in violence. It surrounds her. It inhabits her father and lives on every face in her neighborhood. But Elani has learned a trick: watching people’s hands. If she carefully observes how someone carries a mug or a phone or a bottle, she can spot that subtle difference between holding and wielding.
