One of South African literature's best-kept secrets, Pravasan Pillay is a master of the everyday uncanny. Each set in the author's hometown, the largest Indian settlement outside of India, Chatsworth's slim and compelling tales bring a chaotic working-class community to kaleidoscopic life.
Fêted both in South Africa and Pillay's adopted home of Sweden, British and Irish readers can now enjoy these darkly humourous yet unfailingly compassionate portraits of regular people living on society's fringes – a woman in love with an immigrant against her father's wishes, a struggling elderly mother caring for her co-dependent daughter, girl friends bonding over love letters and bleaching cream, and even a chain-smoking twelve-year-old – authentically rendered in local voice and beautiful, pared-back prose; a unique and unforgettable literary journey.
This edition is not for sale in South Africa.
The South African edition of this book is published by Dye Hard Press, Johannesburg.
"Pillay’s most distinctive achievement is linguistic. The dialogue is rendered in a register saturated with Natal Indian English: ‘katchara people,’ ‘sies,’ ‘ballie,’ ‘toby,’ ‘halfie.’ This is not colour for its own sake. The vernacular indexes caste, class, and racial hierarchy without a word of authorial exposition. [...] Chatsworth shows what an Indian diasporic community looks like once transnational connection has been foreclosed for a century, and in doing so throws into sharper relief just how much of what we now call diasporic life depends on connection remaining open."
– Amrita Datta, South Asian Diaspora
"Where paradox lives and breathes. A literary necessity."
– The Johannesburg Review of Books
"A beautiful love letter to the miscreants, the mothers, the uncles, the girls and the chaos of life."
– The Sunday Times
"Imbued with an existential gloom and austere beauty that is simultaneously hyper-local and universal.”
– Mail & Guardian
