12/05/2016
South African Omotoso makes her U.S. debut with this charming, touching, occasionally radiant tale of two prickly octogenarians: two women, one black and one white, neighbors who discover after 20 years of exchanging digs and insults that they might help each other. Eighty-five-year-old Barbados-born textile designer Hortensia James occupies number 10 in the small upscale Cape Town community of Katterijn. In 1994, when Hortensia and her white husband purchased the house, she became Katterijn’s first black homeowner. Now, 20 years later, she’s a widow who excels at cutting remarks, many aimed at the widow next door, 81-year-old Marion Agostino, self-appointed community leader and number 10’s architect. Their mutual animosity is well established until a repair project leaves Hortensia with a broken leg and Marion in need of temporary housing. Seeing an opportunity to avoid home nurses (whom Hortensia detests even more than she detests Marion), Hortensia invites Marion to move in with her. These creative women then create their own kind of crotchety companionship as Hortensia meets her late husband’s daughter and the descendants of slaves that once occupied her land, while Marion confronts her failures as a mother, employer, and white woman under Apartheid. Omotoso captures the changing racial relations since the 1950s, as well as the immigrant experience through personal detail and small psychological insights into mixed emotions, the artist’s eye, and widow’s remorse. Hers is a fresh voice as adept at evoking the peace of walking up a kopje as the cruelty of South Africa’s past. (Feb.)
"A tale of a rivalry between two well-to-do widows and next-door-neighbors in South Africa...On the surface, author Yewande Omotoso presents a war of wits, but the story also addresses the history of colonialism, slavery, class and race as tensions come to a head."—Time (Female-Driven Books, Movies, and Shows We Can't Wait to Get Our Hands on in 2017)
"Incredibly smart...[The Woman Next Door] will delight you from start to finish."—Cosmopolitan (Best New Books to Read This Spring)
"With humor and charm, [The Woman Next Door] depicts the collapse of a feud between two elderly women—one white, one black—in a tony Cape Town suburb. Call it a female take on Grumpy Old Men."—O, The Oprah Magazine (Ten Titles to Pick Up Now)
"Two elderly Cape Town widows—one black, one white—find their mutual animosity fading in Omotoso's wise and witty tale."—People
"[The Woman Next Door] takes off in surprising ways, sometimes to shocking effect as instances of racial cruelty are recalled, or upsetting at a different level, when the descendants of former slaves make a valid claim for restitution...The novel’s complex plot and convincing characters develop beautifully together and are lightened throughout with flashes of excellent comedy."—The Washington Post
“[A] provocative, enlightening, and at times outrageously funny novel...With an acutely perceptive eye, Omotoso paints a picture of the subtle changes in [Marion and Hortensia's] interactions. As their snipes and barbs morph into attempts at understanding, their personal growth reminds the reader of what is still occurring, on a grander scale, in the country these memorable women call home.”—BookPage
"Omotoso treats her characters and themes delicately and deftly, allowing their complexities to naturally reveal themselves...The Woman Next Door is a thought-provoking representation of timely issues, peppered with smart humor and unforgettably fantastic female protagonists."—The Riveter
"Cape Town's answer to Mapp and Lucia, a war of wits and witticisms amid the bougainvillea of an impossibly smug neighborhood. Yewande Omotoso's deft writing and subtle weaving in of difficult history will leave you in love with these two stubborn old women. Delightful."—Helen Simonson, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Before the War and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
"At once historical and contemporary, The Woman Next Door is charged with beauty, precision, nuance, and hope. Yewande Omotoso is a stunning, essential voice."—NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names
“Omotoso's warm and witty story is more complex than a simple tale of black and white...Like Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, which also depicts the wisdom found in aging, this novel will have universal appeal.”—Library Journal
"Omotoso captures the changing racial relations since the 1950s, as well as the immigrant experience through personal detail and small psychological insights into mixed emotions, the artist's eye, and widow's remorse. Hers is a fresh voice as adept at evoking the peace of walking up a kopje as the cruelty of South Africa's past."—Publishers Weekly
"Yewande Omotoso's voice is exciting and fresh. The aesthetic and political engagement in her work is explored through a deep compassion for her characters and their social positions and constraints, without compromising on a fierce yet tender interrogation of their inner lives: race, place and the social web of expectation versus the freedom of an inner life, a complexity of self that she works out through beautiful and uplifting language."—Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas and The Face: A Cartography of the Void
"Although new to the scene, Yewande Omotoso writes with the skill, intelligence, and compassion of an old master. One of the astonishing achievements of The Woman Next Door is her ability to see all sides of a story. Only such keenness of vision could produce this enlightening and eloquent novel that serves as a testament to a truth that we seldom hear: through honest exchange, it is possible for us to free ourselves from the terrible hauntings of history."—Jeffery Renard Allen, author of Song of the Shank and Rails Under My Back
"A pleasing tale of reconciliation laced with acid humor and a cheery avoidance of sentimentality."—Kirkus Reviews
"[The Woman Next Door] made me howl with laughter and it made me cry."—Biyi Bandele, author of The King's Rifle and director of Half of a Yellow Sun
"Richly imagined...You might not know anyone like these two, but there’s no doubt they exist—Omotoso is that good. Open your friggin’ mind, dude."—Library Journal (Books for Dudes)
11/01/2016
In this elegantly written novel, Omotoso introduces readers to two accomplished, unforgettable women, Marion and Hortensia, who have been neighbors for years in Cape Town's upscale Katterijn. One is an architect and the other a designer, one white and one black, and though they were the products of differing childhood experiences, you might think that they would have found common ground. Instead, they nurture an overt enmity apparently based upon race. Now widowed, the two women face uncomfortable truths about the men they married, with each reflecting upon choices made, dreams deferred, and lost chances at connection. Forging ahead into old age, these proud, feisty women must decide whether to expend waning energy on their feud or call a truce. Omotoso's warm and witty story is more complex than a simple tale of black and white, with Katterijn a microcosm of a city and a country still grappling with the repercussions of apartheid's end. VERDICT Omotoso, one of many entrancing young writers emerging from Africa today, won the South African Literary Award in 2011 for her debut novel, Bom Boy. Like Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which also depicts the wisdom found in aging, this novel will have universal appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
2016-11-07
Neighborliness isn't an option for two elderly enemies living in adjacent homes in Katterijn, an upscale South African residential community. So what will happen when events push them into grudging cohabitation?They call each other Hortensia the Horrible and Marion the Vulture, and they've lived next door to each other for 20 unfriendly years, with black Hortensia James openly despising white Marion Agostino's racism. Marion, mother of four and a widow, is 81; childless, Barbadian Hortensia, whose husband is on his deathbed, is four years older. Both struggled successfully to express their outstanding creativity in the mid-20th century, when working women with their own businesses were rare. Hortensia overcame racism and parental disapproval to found a famed fabric-design company, while Marion built a successful architectural practice until her pregnancies forced her to quit. In her U.S. debut, South Africa-based Barbadian writer Omotoso does a deft job of shading in the personal and professional back stories to this pair of life-hardened battle-axes, adding a deeper layer of historical resonance in the form of a surprise claim for restitution by descendants of slaves quartered at Katterijn. Children, marriage, money, race, forgiveness, and ownership all play a part as the two old sparring partners find it useful—after an accident which leaves Hortensia bed-bound and Marion homeless—to share a house, coming to terms in the process with their own and each other's truths. Hortensia will have none of Marion's "Thelma-and-Louise bullshit" as they open up to each other and compassion emerges (mixed with impatience in Hortensia's case and shame in Marion's) for babies born and not born, opportunities lost, and the suffering of generations past. A pleasing tale of reconciliation laced with acid humor and a cheery avoidance of sentimentality.
