Samson

Samson is a young adult novel with a real subject, and it knows exactly what that subject is. Set in 1996 KwaZulu-Natal, it follows four orphaned brothers shunned by their community because the rumour of AIDS has attached itself to their grief. It then turns that rumour into a study of how fear, ignorance and old betrayal travel through a rural community.

The book's boldest craft decision is to put its most important teaching in a church. Dr. Nathi Zondi stands before the congregation, cuts his own finger, and explains the immune system as a country defended by police and soldiers: "My blood is my amabutho, my war regiment." He tells them the virus "puts on the uniform" of the defenders, which is why it can't be killed. This is how a Zulu community would hear it, and it is also how a teenage reader can understand it. The adult world gets just as much weight when Nathi tells the young men to "contain the fire within you," and when the wise mother asks the question about breastfeeding that has no easy answer.

The emotional beats land because they are small and physical. The brothers' laughter after Nonhlala's knocked-out teeth ("Lizard."). The Honey-guide bird. Xolisa's grace over honeycomb: "all I want to say is thank you God for this wonderful meal." The family tragedy is built on a circle of revenge (Zeblon shoots Nathi's father, whose "treachery" was coerced by the security police, while the true informer was the minister himself), and Samson's answer to it is quietly moving: "We cannot carry the past in us, because that past, as it was known to us was a lie." The epilogue pays this off with a memorial notice and a new baby named Samson.

This is a book for readers who want a story about the AIDS years in South Africa told with moral seriousness and local detail, and it delivers that.