69 Jerusalem Street
Lindiwe Nkutha
In her debut collection of short stories, Lindiwe Nkutha takes us through the minds of people you may overlook on an ordinary day. Nkutha’s words weave in and around the weights we drag behind us from one place to another, with a sensitivity and wit required for such vulnerabilities and intimate moments.
R250.00
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69 Jerusalem Street
In her debut collection of short stories, Lindiwe Nkutha takes us through the minds of people you may overlook on an ordinary day: The wayward neighbour you vaguely remember seeing every day as a child until the day he vanished. The face you see every weekend at the local drinking hole, you exchange a polite nod but know little about, not even her name. The young woman who is caught between her faith and her love for a woman. Their lives are untidy, tainted with the pain, joy and violence as they share with us stories they wouldn’t share with anyone else.
Nkutha’s words weave in and around the weights we drag behind us from one place to another, with a sensitivity and wit required for such vulnerabilities and intimate moments.
Lindiwe Nkutha is an author of short stories and a reluctant poet, whose stories and poems have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. Although trained as an accountant, and working as one, she keeps kindled inside her heart (with varying levels of success) the fire to tell stories as often as she can manage it.
She is fascinated and inspired to tell these stories by the world, and the quirky and eccentric people that populate it.
Although born in Soweto, she now lives in Johannesburg with her wife Lerato, surrounded by their capricious veggie and herb garden.
Read an extract in The Johannesburg Review of Books
“Each story here has the velocity and voluptuous fullness of a novella, or a street corner epic banter. The writing is a flourish of (un-pretentious) philosophical gravity, leavened with every day dialogue, and accessible beauty. This is an imaginative collection that sets fire to the confines of genre: It is both poetry and prose. It is all the richer for this. Unorthodox, and ultimately alive.” – Bongani Madondo
“A fine, heartwarming collection of stories that reveals the nuance of women in townships in dignified, elegant, prose. Lindiwe Nkutha tells stories about women kokasi without falling into stereotypes and clichés. She has humanized where I come from and my people, for that, I thank her.” – Welcome Lishivha
“Readers will find beautifully and carefully crafted stories with exuberant prose that reveals moments of beauty, struggle and agency, moments that create a mirage of the complexity of women, especially those in townships. This account of women’s experiences is much needed in a climate where women continue to be victims of patriarchal expression and an insistence on the repression of their voices. The short story collection is refreshing in its offering of Ifi Amadiume’s sentiment that ‘in the cultures, religions, and art of the European colonisers, African women have had to struggle against imposed forms of patriarchal domination to find creative spaces to express themselves and their own choice of womanhood’ (Amadiume 2008, 59).” – Welcome Mandla Lishivha in Journal of Contemporary African Studies
