"Extraordinarily compelling and honest, this elegant novel sees a guilt-ridden, grief-stricken South African mother embrace a voyage of self-discovery while deciphering her deceased daughter’s life."
Honest, engaging, elegant and easily readable, Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief presents a uniquely personal portrait of a mother’s grief, identity crisis and transformation in the aftermath of her daughter’s death. To her shame, it’s only when Yinka dies in tragic circumstances that Mojisola is forced to admit that she barely knew her own daughter. Yinka had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg, and so Mojisola travels to her daughter’s flat to discover the young woman she was through accessing her laptop, trawling the dating site she used, and stepping into her shoes (quite literally at one point). In so doing, Mojisola faces the fact that she’s been living something of a lie - her marriage has long since been satisfying; she has become solely defined as a wife and mother.
In elegant, lucid style, the author unpacks so many truths about identity, womanhood, sexuality, and masculinity too, through excerpts from her husband’s therapy journal. “You’re right,” he acknowledges. “We have been useless at the truth.” In time, through loss comes reconciliation and the prospect of a new kind of life as Mojisola comes to a new sense of confidence and honesty - “Now she walks in the streets as if she built them with her own hands… she sees herself, her fragility, her ugliness and wonder. She sees her shame and her courage, her capacity for failure but also for magic.” Beautiful, bold and exquisitely characterful, An Unusual Grief shows that Omotoso is the real deal - a writer of original talent and power.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
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