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Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024
A Literary Review of Canada Best Book Cover of 2024
A taut and unsparing novel about a community plagued by violence, drugs, corruption, and prejudice—but where love and justice prevail.
The unidentifiable remains of a body are discovered in a field in Shadow Heights, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. Ley, the youngest detective at her precinct, is assigned the case and quickly begins her investigation. Soon after, Ley receives a phone call saying that Carl, a friend struggling with a meth addiction, has gone missing after being linked to the Drug King of Shadow Heights. Meanwhile, a local church group believe they are cleansing the area by burning sinners, starting with homosexuals.
The search for Carl and the truth leads the reader through the vibrant lives of the residents of Shadow Heights. Violence, poverty, and shame plague the neighbourhood, but there is also love, acceptance, and hope to be found among friends and family in the shadows of everyday life.
A pioneering work of fiction in which the dispossessed tell their own stories, Innie Shadows is the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently a spoken language only.
"Groundbreaking and unique, character-driven crime fiction written in my favourite dialect. I was mesmerized." —Deon Meyer
"Fresh, searing, gritty, richly vivid, and fearless, Innie Shadows is not afraid to speak its truth. Innie Shadows will take you deep into a world ruled by desire, greed, lust, and the raw destruction of all that is vulnerable, precious, and innocent. But there is love, hope, joy, and rebirth. As a character in the book says, ‘And you say there's nothing beautiful here.’ There most certainly is." —Lisa de Nikolits, author of Everything You Dream is Real, Rotten Peaches, and The Witchdoctor’s Bones
"Olivia M. Coetzee’s swift-moving, tautly constructed novel about the inhabitants of the Shadows is suspenseful, surprising, and, in the end, devastating." —Méira Cook, author of The Full Catastrophe
Innie Shadows is a fast-paced yet richly detailed story … The characters leap off the page, fully human.” —Adriana Chartrand, author of An Ordinary Violence
"A searing crime novel, a spellbinding story of queer desire, friendship, and resilience, and a trailblazing work of fiction, Innie Shadows is an authentic, unsentimental, fearless achievement. Even in its darkest moments, it brims with life." —Kathy Friedman, author of All the Shining People
“Coetzee’s tale is anything but formulaic … What sets it apart from most other whodunits is that after introducing us to a corpse and a cop, Coetzee keeps Detective Ley nearly entirely off screen … Instead, she opts to follow a broad cast of characters over nearly a fortnight, letting the solution to the mystery unspool through their day-to-day lives.” — Washington Independent Review of Books
“An often painful but nonetheless compelling and eye-opening read. “ — Booklist
“There can be no doubt that Olivia Coetzee’s Innie Shadows is an impressive debut novel.” — The Miramichi Reader