Young Blood

"This was the first book that looked at township life in South Africa from a novelist’s point of view. Mzobi knows it really well. This was a landmark in South African crime fiction because it switched from the police procedural thriller trope to a novel based on a coming of age in the townships where the only way of making it, in any sense, is through crime. This is not such a recent book (we tried to focus on more recent books) but it’s still as relevant today as it was when he wrote it. It won the Sunday Times literary prize in 2011 as well as the 2012 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. It’s now been published by Catalyst Press, so it’s available internationally. Yes, absolutely. This book really introduces readers to the way in which these townships operate and the opportunities, or lack thereof, that young people have. Unemployment of young people in South Africa is at around 50 percent today, so it’s even worse than in the days when the book was set. It also shows the physical structure. You have a white suburb and then there is a township that has developed around that, which may be for supplying work to that area. In the apartheid days, there was a white area with the city and the factories and the townships developed around that. Around those were informal settlements, and around those were more informal settlements. You’ll have somebody building a shack and then renting out half of it to somebody else or saying, ‘You can build a shack over there.’ I think fiction does a wonderful job of introducing people to these realities. The sense of place is one of the most important things about Young Blood . But it’s only valuable because of the character that we care about. He gets sucked into the criminal side and then tries to fight his way back out, which is difficult because once you’ve been involved, you know things and people don’t want you to ever leave. The book is very successful at following that character in the first person through the book and illustrating the setting. I think that’s why it was a landmark. Nobody else had done that."