Contemporary Authors

• Bom Boy Modjaji Books (Cape Town, South Africa), 2011
• The Woman Next Door ( novel) Picador (New York, NY), 2017

1. The woman next door : a novel LCCN 2016039182 Type of material Book Personal name Omotoso, Yewande, author. Main title The woman next door : a novel / Yewande Omotoso. Edition First U.S. Edition. Published/Produced New York : Picador, 2017. ©2016 Projected pub date 1702 Description pages cm ISBN 9781250124579 (paperback) Library of Congress Holdings Information not available. 2. The woman next door LCCN 2016438209 Type of material Book Personal name Omotoso, Yewande, author. Main title The woman next door / Yewande Omotoso. Published/Produced London : Chatto & Windus, 2016. Description 279 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9781784740337 (HB) 1784740330 (HB) 9781784740344 (TPB) 1784740349 (TPB) Links Contributor biographical information https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1620/2016438209-b.html Publisher description https://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1620/2016438209-d.html CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.O567 W66 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. Bom boy LCCN 2012435461 Type of material Book Personal name Omotoso, Yewande. Main title Bom boy / Yewande Omotoso. Published/Created Athlone, South Africa : Modjaji Books, 2011 Description 255 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 1920397353 9781920397357 CALL NUMBER PR9369.4.O567 B65 2011 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Short Story Day Africa - http://shortstorydayafrica.org/news/in-my-storytelling-i-privilege-the-micro-an-interview-with-yewande-omotoso

  ‘In My Storytelling I Privilege The Micro.’ An Interview With Yewande Omotoso.
  June 1, 2016

  Yewande Omotoso needs no introduction to African fiction lovers. Her debut novel, Bom Boy, was highly acclaimed, and her second highly anticipated novel, The Woman Next Door, has recently been published. Here she shares some of her measured and astute observations.

  After finishing The Woman Next Door, I was struck by how you strive to write in opposition to the phrase, "Write what you know". In your debut novel, Bom Boy, your main character was a young man who was adopted by white parents. Now, in your current story, we have two older women who have survived rather tricky marriages. What attracts you to writing what you don't know?

  YEWANDE: I won’t say I set out to write what I don’t know. In fact a current struggle is that I can’t allow myself to write, as main characters, people whose first languages I don’t speak. Since I only speak English with any competence it means (in accordance with ‘write what you know’) I’m, for the moment anyway, caught writing first language English speakers. I hope to get free of this.

  Back to the question, while I’m not specifically attracted to writing what I don’t know, I do seek to write what preoccupies me. With Bom Boy the story came out of a preoccupation with solitude and, for whatever reason, the character came as a boy. As in I don’t have a moment when I get to decide what gender race or age the characters are. They kind of materialise and there they are. With The Woman Next Door, perhaps after spending some time with my grandmother, I became preoccupied with (amongst other things) what it might be like to have the bulk of your life behind you.

  The other thing is I do feel connection to the characters. I don’t write thinking, wow, these people are so different to me. I write thinking, in some ways we’re not all as different as we’d like to believe. I think part of the important work of life is to get connected, be connected, see ourselves in others.

  You wrote, "It saddened her that what she considered the best thing about herself was a puzzle to her husband."
  Both your main characters are, in many ways, islands of themselves. The people in their every day – spouses and, for one, her children – do not know them well. Do you think this holds true, in some manner, for most people?

  YEWANDE: I couldn’t say, with certainty, what holds true for most. However I do think there is complexity to being human. Do we hide parts of ourselves from others? Or do parts of what we are remain unknown, for whatever innocent reason, even from our dearest? Do we even know ourselves fully? And if we know ourselves or others as one thing does it mean we or they are not (or could never be) another?

  This is where my interest lies, in exploring those gaps in knowing, the unsaid. I think that’s where the stories are.

  "Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning."
  In South Africa people often become caught up in seeing hate as something that exists in the macro: race, gender, xenophobia and religion. While race and class are present in The Woman Next Door, the biggest examples of hate are in the micro – neighbours, children, husband and, perhaps, employees. Why is the micro important in storytelling?

  YEWANDE: I think seeing hate in the macro is the habit of not only South Africans but humanity in general. What we miss is that the reason hate is there in the macro is because it’s there in the micro. And while yes we need to tackle institutions (because in many scenarios hate has no face which is what helps keep it in place) we also need to deal with ourselves and our neighbours, our friends and so on. It’s easier to say corruption and look at big things like Government and the Police Force. When we run a light are we corrupting something? When we drive above the limit are we corrupting?

  In my storytelling I privilege the micro. That’s what I’m obsessed with and fascinated by, those minute human-scale details. My hunch is there are clues in there.

  For an African writer living and writing on the African continent, you've received a lot of press. Which is, I am sure, great for your career. But is there a pressure, too, at being so visible?

  YEWANDE: Not sure what the definition of “a lot” is here. I think there are several writers living on the continent and I also think there is an interest in what they are writing, doing and saying. This is essentially good. Does the attention and visibility create pressure? Well, I think it’s important to always remember what the job is. The job is not to be pressured or even to be visible. The job, before any other, is surely to write and write well. My ideal scenario (and what I believe is most conducive to productivity) is for the work to be visible, the person who made it mostly ought to disappear.

  The term "African Lit" sparks many opinions, debates and conversations. Is there a conversation that is being overlooked? What should readers, writers and publishers be talking about in regards to the literature being born on the continent?

  YEWANDE: I don’t like to push any shoulds because, who knows, really? But I think we could talk more about language. English, French, Portuguese but more importantly Hausa, Yoruba, Zulu, Swahili, Fanti and so on. We could talk about translation, set up schools and courses. I think we need to celebrate but also breed more critics and reviewers. We could talk about non-fiction. We could talk about how we distribute books across the continent, how do we ensure we’re reading each other – things like that.

  On Yewande's Bedside Table

  A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin, Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta, Unimportance by Thando Mgqolozana, Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, A Bit Of Difference by Sefi Atta

  Currently reading Sweet Medicine by Panashe Chigumadzi

  Yewande Omotoso is an architect with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. Her debut novel ‘Bom Boy’ (Modjaji Books, 2011), was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Yewande was a 2013 Norman Mailer Fellow and a 2014 Etisalat Fellow. She was a 2015 Miles Morland Scholar. ‘The Woman Next Door’ (Chatto and Windus, 2016) is Yewande’s second novel.

  Interview by Tiah Beautement a.k.a @ms_tiahmarie

  Photo of Yewande by Victor Dlamini a.k.a @victordlamini

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514495267/next-door-neighbors-gradually-learn-to-get-along-in-post-apartheid-cape-town

  'Next Door' Neighbors Gradually Learn To Get Along In Post-Apartheid Cape Town

  Listen· 8:05

  Toggle more options
  February 12, 20177:45 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Sunday
  NPR STAFF
  The Woman Next Door
  The Woman Next Door
  by Yewande Omotoso

  Paperback, 280 pages purchase

  For decades, the two strong-willed women in Yewande Omotoso's new novel were committed enemies. Hortensia is black, Marion is white and both are widows in their 80s. Their properties — in an affluent neighborhood in Cape Town, South Africa — sit next door to one another. Then, one day, an accident brings them together.

  Omotoso's book is called The Woman Next Door. She tells NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro that while Hortensia and Marion do come together, they don't exactly become friends. "I like to think of what they have as a hate-ship rather than a friendship," she says.

  Interview Highlights
  On Marion, a character who experienced the white side of apartheid and has trouble adjusting to the new South Africa

  I was really interested in looking at what is it like, particularly for Marion's character, to have been someone during the apartheid days who didn't necessarily resist apartheid, disagree with it, but kind of went along. What is it like now, you know, post-apartheid? What does she do with her opinions? What does she do with the mental gymnastics she had to create for herself to agree with something like an apartheid system that says this kind of skin color is better than that kind of skin color? I wanted to look at this character, or attempt to look at her, with compassion.

  A friend of mine who's a psychologist often says, you know, being racist is a bit like being an alcoholic: You have to be able to acknowledge your racism and your prejudice, and that's the beginning. And I wanted to have this character, Marion, who's definitely full of prejudice and so stuck because of it and, like, she cannot give it up. ... [She resists] acknowledging that she was wrong, that apartheid was wrong, that it was a horror and that these are the things it did to the country she lived in.

  On the scene in which a family patriarch sees a house servant dressed nicely and accuses her of stealing

  On one level, it's ... this man unable to understand how the woman that works for him can have good things. In the scene, she's finished working and has dressed because she's off somewhere — maybe she's going to a party or meeting a friend. And the sight of her not in her uniform, let's say, it shocks him. All he can imagine is that those things are not hers and that they are his wife's. Now, his wife comes home and obviously the things don't fit her and they're not her things, but that's quietly put aside.

  Yewande Omotoso lives in Johannesburg, where she works as an architect.
  Victor Dlamini /Courtesy of Picador
  So that is actually particularly violent. ... He strips her down, you know, and takes these things from her. But there's also something, for me, allegorical about that ... the kind of things that have to be done to maintain the myth that [he is] better. So to maintain that myth, [he has] to absolutely break you. ... And so the scene where he strips her, I wanted it to be so personal. It's such an affront. And I think that's a true thing when we set up these false privileges. It's a true thing; it's so fragile. That's the fragility of these systems. It's not enough that the entire government is, for [him], a patriarch, and is not for you, you know, the black woman working in [his] house. [He] also [has] to take your own sense of self away from you. That's how fragile [he is].

  On the importance of portraying instances of casual, unspoken racism

  We can look at government and we can say, "Oh, government is corrupt." But when we drive drunk or run the red light or whatever, we do not recognize that as a corrupting. And I'm really interested in individuals recognizing the little things, the seemingly innocuous things. And part of this whole thing is shame still carries. You know, Marion carries a lot of shame. Underneath her anger and righteousness is a deep shame, because the humanity in her, whatever is there, knows. So how do you begin to release that if you don't address even the most innocuous things as a kind of violence? Those things have their own kind of violence.

  'Daily Show' Host Writes About Growing Up Biracial In South Africa
  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  'Daily Show' Host Writes About Growing Up Biracial In South Africa
  20 Years After Apartheid, South Africa Asks, 'How Are We Doing?'
  PARALLELS
  20 Years After Apartheid, South Africa Asks, 'How Are We Doing?'
  On the book's cautious optimism about healing racial inequality

  I didn't want to write a book with a very simple, happy ending, and I don't necessarily think that's what I did. I think it feels like it's delicate — that's the caution, that this is delicate. And I think it's important to remember, as we connect and repair, that it's delicate. ... And so the optimism is as important as the caution because we also get careless sometimes and we think, Ah, you know, we did it.

  And I think South Africa, in a way, may have been careless. I don't know if that's quite the word, but we talk now about the rainbow project, you know, rainbow South Africa, the rainbow nation, and we sometimes talk about it disparagingly because it feels like that was too optimistic and we didn't do the really hard dirty work to kind of peel underneath the scab. My sense of Marion and Hortensia is that they're just going to try and plod along. They're going to argue a lot. There might be long periods of sulking, and occasionally they would have a meal or they'll sit down together. And that's OK because it means that we're always trying and always attempting, which I think is more important than feeling like we've arrived somewhere.

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2142803/yewande-omotoso

  Yewande Omotoso
  Y O
  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  YEWANDE OMOTOSO was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria, moving to South Africa with her family in 1992. She is the author of Bom Boy, published in South Africa in 2011. In 2012 she was on the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author and was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize. In 2013 she was a finalist in the the inaugural, pan-African Etisalat Fiction Prize along with NoViolet Bulawayo and Karen Jennings. She lives in Johannesburg, where she writes and has her own architectural practice.

  SEE LESS

• Yewande Omotoso blog - https://1of6billion.wordpress.com

  About
  Leave a commentGo to comments
  I am an architect, writer and backyard tourist. This blog is about living in Cape Town, travelling around Africa. It will dwell on observations about cities, nature, art, culture and in particular people. There is much to see.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yewande_Omotoso

  Yewande Omotoso
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Yewande Omotoso
  Born 1980
  Bridgetown, Barbados
  Residence South Africa
  Occupation Novelist, architect and designer
  Notable work Bom Boy (2011)
  The Woman Next Door (2016)
  Yewande Omotoso (born 1980) is a South African-based novelist, architect and designer, who was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria.[1] She is the daughter of Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, and the sister of film maker Akin Omotoso.[2] She currently lives in Johannesburg.[3] Her two published novels have earned her considerable attention, including winning the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, being shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary Awards 2012,[4] and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and being longlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.[5]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early years and education
  2 Writing career
  3 Bibliography
  4 References
  5 External links
  Early years and education[edit]
  Yewande Omotoso was born in Bridgetown, Barbados;[6] and within a year of her birth went with her Barbadian mother, Nigerian father and two older brothers to Nigeria. She grew up in Ile-Ife, Osun State, until 1992, when the family moved to South Africa[7][8] after her father took an took an academic appointment with the University of the Western Cape.[9] She has said, "Regardless of how many years I’ve lived in South Africa I think of myself as a product of three nations: Barbados, Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria forms a very strong part of my sense of myself, my identity",[7] and in a 2015 interview she said: "Identity is complex. I love being a Nigerian, I love belonging to that identity even if my belonging is complex, due to my multiple identities and migratory life experience."[10]

  She studied architecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and after working for some years as an architect went on to obtain a master's degree in Creative Writing at the university.[8]

  Writing career[edit]
  Omotoso's debut novel, Bom Boy, was published in 2011 by Modjaji Books. It won the 2012 South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, was shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and for the M-Net Literary Awards 2012.[4] Bom Boy was also runner-up for the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature,[11] following which Omotoso took up a 2014 Etisalat Fellowship at the University of East Anglia[10] that was given up on her behalf by the 2013 prizewinner NoViolet Bulawayo.[12]

  Omotoso was a 2013 Norman Mailer Fellow, and was the recipient of a Miles Morland Scholarship in 2014.[13][14][15]

  Like Bom Boy, her second novel, The Woman Next Door (Chatto and Windus, 2016)[16] was also positively reviewed, with Publishers Weekly referring to it as "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.... 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."[17] The Irish Independent described The Woman Next Door as "a finely observed account of female prejudice, redemption and that often elusive commodity - friendship."[18] It was longlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017.[19]

  Omotoso has contributed stories and poetry to various publications, among them Konch, Noir Nation, Speaking for the Generation: Contemporary Stories from Africa, Contemporary African Women’s Poetry,[8] Kalahari Review, The Moth Literary Journal, One World Two and the 2012 Caine Prize Anthology.[20]

  She is a frequent participant in literary festivals including the Aké Arts and Book Festival,[21] the Edinburgh International Book Festival[22] and the PEN American World Voices Festival.[23]

  Bibliography[edit]
  Bom Boy, Modjaji Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-920397-35-7[24]
  The Woman Next Door, Chatto and Windus, 2016.[25]

The Woman Next Door
Deborah Donovan
BookPage.
(Feb. 2017): p20.
COPYRIGHT 2017 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR
By Yewande Omotoso
Picador
$16, 288 pages
ISBN 9781250124579
eBook available
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Yewande Omotoso, a Barbadosborn author who moved to South Africa in 1992, makes her U.S. fiction debut with this
provocative, enlightening and at times outrageously funny novel about two old and very opinionated neighbors in
Katterijn, a wealthy suburb of Cape Town.
Marion Agostino is a white native of Cape Town, a widow and the head of their enclave's property owners. She once
was the principal architect in her own firm, but gave up that work when she became the mother of four children, who
now mostly ignore her. Hortensia James, a famous black textile designer whose husband is on his deathbed, has been
her neighbor for the past 20 years. The relationship between these strong, creative women has been nothing but
contentious. In chapters alternating between their voices, Omotoso slowly fills in their backstories, revealing their
loves, hopes and disappointments to give insight into how they evolved into the women they are now.
Then an event occurs that forces Marion and Hortensia to come together--both living temporarily under the same roof.
With an acutely perceptive eye, Omotoso paints a picture of the subtle changes in their 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.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Donovan, Deborah. "The Woman Next Door." BookPage, Feb. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506825480369 2/6
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479076918&it=r&asid=b2a572bfc0e2f6b8392d12e511e264e4.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479076918
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506825480369 3/6
The Woman Next Door
Publishers Weekly.
263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p43.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Woman Next Door
Yewande Omotoso. Picador, $16 (288p) ISBN 978-1-250-12457-9
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.)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"The Woman Next Door." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224827&it=r&asid=f0bdb69a9e90d20f2faab607988482bb.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224827
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506825480369 4/6
The Woman Next Door
Magan Szwarek
Booklist.
113.7 (Dec. 1, 2016): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Woman Next Door.
By Yewande Omotoso.
Feb. 2017. 288p. Picador, paper, $16 (9781250124579); e-book (9781250124586).
Hortensia James and Marion Agostino have been neighbors and enemies for more than 20 years, practically since the
day Hortensia and her husband moved in next door to Marion in Katterjin, a wealthy subdivision of suburban Cape
Town. Omotoso's U.S. debut is an intimate, frequently hilarious look at the lives of two extraordinary women set in
postapartheid South Africa. As the chapters, alternating between the two protagonists' perspectives, unfold, readers
learn the origins of the deliberate antagonism of these neighbors. Hortensia, in her early eighties, is a wildly successful
textile designer drowning in a self-imposed sea of bitterness. Marion, of similar age, is a native of Cape Town who was
the principal of her own architecture firm before choosing motherhood over career. When circumstances force the two
women to turn to each other of necessity, their resulting awakening is deeply satisfying and realistic in its untidiness.
The vivid setting and intricate descriptions transport the reader to this very specific time and place, though the crackling
dialog and lively, fiercely independent protagonists are universal. --Magan Szwarek
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Szwarek, Magan. "The Woman Next Door." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474718076&it=r&asid=39a47bca8e04c90e862545196563eff4.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A474718076
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506825480369 5/6
Omotoso, Yewande: THE WOMAN NEXT
DOOR
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Omotoso, Yewande THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR Picador (Adult Fiction) $16.00 2, 7 ISBN: 978-1-250-12457-9
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 lifehardened
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.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Omotoso, Yewande: THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865684&it=r&asid=756aa33abf1dbe3d5e288a759399185a.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865684
9/30/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506825480369 6/6
Omotoso, Yewande. The Woman Next Door
Sally Bissell
Library Journal.
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p78.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Omotoso, Yewande. The Woman Next Door. Picador. Feb. 2017.288p. ISBN 9781250124579. pap. $16.; ebk. ISBN
9781250124586. F
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
Bissell, Sally
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bissell, Sally. "Omotoso, Yewande. The Woman Next Door." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 78. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830348&it=r&asid=a756d79f4744e35b7d13e31042933012.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467830348

Donovan, Deborah. "The Woman Next Door." BookPage, Feb. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479076918&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "The Woman Next Door." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 43. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224827&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Szwarek, Magan. "The Woman Next Door." Booklist, 1 Dec. 2016, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA474718076&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. "Omotoso, Yewande: THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865684&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017. Bissell, Sally. "Omotoso, Yewande. The Woman Next Door." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830348&it=r. Accessed 30 Sept. 2017.

• Africa is a Country
  http://africasacountry.com/2012/05/bom-boy/
  Word count: 498

  Bom Boy
  MAY 8, 2012 by DYLAN VALLEY
  1

  ‘A thing had begun to grow like a tree in Leke’s throat.’ So begins Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy, a bright debut novel that sits comfortably in the realm of magic realism, somewhere between folklore, memoir and modern fiction. Leke Denton is the son of a Nigerian father and a “coloured” South African mother, who through uncontrollable circumstances gives baby Leke for adoption to a White Capetonian couple, the loving Jane and the well-meaning Marcus. After Jane dies due to a sudden illness, Leke is left even more lost in a city that specializes in alienation. As a young adult he becomes reclusive and starts stalking people; he makes endless doctor’s appointments and false check ups in order to have basic human contact. He eventually finds out through old letters from his biological father about a family curse, and he starts piecing his past together.

  I found the book to be genuinely refreshing, with characters that constantly surprised me; they all unraveled very gently throughout the narrative like flowers in bloom. (Which works for this romantic.) Just when you think you’ve figured the characters out, the author opens them up a little more, and our perceptions change.

  Yewande told me she wanted the reader to “be compelled to consider their own prejudices, and the shortcomings of these. Mostly I wanted people to experience compassion for the characters, to be unable to simply write even the most difficult of characters off.”

  A Cape Town based architect “by day,” Omotoso had to wake up at 5am every morning and write for two hours before it was time to leave for work. She describes it as somewhat of a “military operation.” She comes from a family of writers, and completing a novel was something she had wanted to do for many years. Her father, Professor Kole Omotoso has written five novels, not to mention a plethora of academic publications, plays and literary critiques. Fun fact: he is famously known in South Africa as the “Yebo, Gogo” man in the Vodacom commercials from the late 90s-early 2000s. Her brother is the well-known and respected filmmaker/writer/director Akin Omotoso (remember his ‘God is African’, but he also has recently completed a new feature — ‘Man on Ground’ — tackling the South Africa’s xenophobic streak). I mention to Yewande that Bom Boy would make a great film and asked whether a sibling collaboration is on the cards. “We’ve spoken about it. I think we’d like to do something together in the future.”

  Bom Boy is a debut novel that deserves your attention. As Tade Ipadeola writes in the Lagos Review of Books, “I hope, sincerely, that this golden debut fills every barren space on the continent from the Karoo to the Sahara with the chlorophyll of hope…” So do we.

  Read an excerpt of Bom Boy here.

• City Press
  http://city-press.news24.com/Lifestyle/News/Book-review-Stranger-in-a-strange-land-20111029
  Word count: 769

  Book review – Stranger in a strange land
  2011-10-30 10:00
  Karabo Kgoleng
  When Leke’s adoptive mother, Jane, dies after a long and excruciating illness, the awkward boy’s life takes a sad and isolated turn. His fraught relationship with Marcus, Jane’s academic husband, doesn’t help.

  He grows into a borderline sociopath with no attachments to anything except the car that Jane bequeathed him – an old Volvo named Red – and a photograph of a mysterious woman he accidentally discovered among Jane’s possessions shortly before her death.

  Leke has strange habits. He steals from people, stalks them and defrauds the medical aid firm he works for in order to make multiple visits to healthcare practitioners, to whom he presents fictitious ailments.

  For Leke’s birthday, Marcus gives him a brown envelope. It contains the key to crucial parts of Leke’s identity.

  In it are letters from his Nigerian father, Oscar, and through these letters and a series of flashbacks, Leke’s personal history is revealed.

  Bom Boy is a moving, intelligent debut from Cape Town-based architect Yewande Omotoso, who thought it would be “interesting to write about someone totally estranged from society”.

  “I first imagined (Leke) as a young adult (he is introduced to the reader at age 10) – alone, almost incapable of friendship. I even sometimes envisioned him as having some kind of pathology,” says Omotoso.

  “I also wanted to explore the idea that someone so misplaced in society was living in a country that was not his own. And even though he’d been born and grew up there, he still didn’t quite fit in.”

  The adoption theme in the story has two elements to it. There is the double loss in that Leke loses two mothers in the first decade of his life, and then there’s the controversial intercultural adoption that has tongues wagging.

  There’s the cynical notion of the black baby as the white woman’s ultimate accessory and the sociopolitical arguments that accompany this issue.

  Omotoso handles this with sensitive dexterity. It is easy to judge when you sit on the outside of what is a delicate and intimate family situation.

  She explains the adoption theme: “In my process of discovering about Leke, I realised that he had been adopted and this played a role in his sense of displacement. But it had also played a role in his sense of being loved.

  “I wanted the adoption to both have been a very safe, intensely loving space for him while Jane lived, as well as an anguished, desolate space after Jane died.”

  She leaves the rest of the issue for the reader to decide.

  Although Omotoso provides insight into parts of the lives of Leke’s biological and adoptive parents, the story is heavily centred on him.

  His petty and not-so-petty criminal activity represents how he wishes to feel more connected to a world that he struggles to understand, a world that in turn appears to conspire to exclude him.

  In his biological father’s letters, Leke discovers Yoruba folklore and the family curse. He wonders whether being far from the origin of this curse (Nigeria) has lessened its effect.

  Leke is also a dreamer. On these two aspects of the story, Omotoso says: “For Leke, the real world is exhausting to navigate, so his dreams become his real life. The Yoruba stories are critical to the novel.

  “The idea is that Leke is so formless, so ungrounded, yet there is such a solid foundation waiting for him somewhere just beyond his reach – in the letters, in his father’s stories. I wanted to contrast Oscar’s rich, culturally filled life with Leke’s barren one.”

  It is not uncommon to attribute unfortunate circumstances to supernatural powers and although it appears that a rational Western scientific paradigm dominates economic and academic life, the allure of a curse hanging over you when things don’t look good is hard to resist.

  That unrelenting need to have meaning in one’s life is also explored through the family curse in Bom Boy.

  There is a small cast of characters who appear sporadically through the novel, yet they somehow stay with you.

  Bom Boy is bittersweet with a pleasant, hopeful aftertaste.

  Bom Boy by Yewande Omotoso
  Modjaji Books
  250 pages; R180

• Not Now, Darling...I'm Reading
  http://notnowdarling.co.za/review-bom-boy/
  Word count: 701

  REVIEW: Bom Boy by Yewande Omotoso
  Posted on November 26, 2012 By KarinSchimke

  Bom Boy

  Yewande Omotoso

  Modjaji Books

  REVIEW BY: Aly Verbaan

  It is often said that there is nothing more boring than other people’s dreams. I beg to differ. I don’t believe in Freud, but I do believe in the meaning of dreams and nightmares.

  Ten-year-old Leke has a dream on the first page of Bom Boy, a simple child’s dream of acceptance and victory, but it’s a precursor to the 20-year-old Leke’s dreams, which uncloak just enough to convince the reader to give Leke another chance. Because Leke, or Bom Boy, is by no means a sympathetic character. He’s cold and calculating, and not particularly friendly to the other characters. But his dreams touch a common nerve: we know that someone who “slept, fell into a charcoal black hole and emerged exhausted, his muscles aching from a fight he couldn’t remember” is battling demons. His dreams are more real to him than reality, in which he is unmoored and without a compass.

  Adopted as a baby by Jane and Marcus, a childless, white, middle-class Capetonian couple, Leke is an object of ridicule amongst the other kids: they know he is adopted because he is of mixed race. As an adult, Leke is rootless and immensely alone. Jane has died a protracted death to cancer, and Leke’s relationship with Marcus is fraying at the edges. The only affaire de coeur Leke has is with his car, Red, which he parks inside his studio apartment and sometimes sleeps in.

  Packed to the gunwales with quirks, Leke is sometimes to be found planting Four O’Clocks in the moonlight, sometimes thieving at the local mall. He is sensitive and overwhelmed by life, but he is also siphoning off money from the Western Medical Fund where he works as a programmer.

  Leke aches for human contact, touch, more urgently than anything else. He uses the medical fund to pay for a slew of medical check-ups: GPs, dentists, herbalists, optometrists, Hellerworkers, and even blood donations, just for the intimacy with another person. “‘Where does it hurt?’” asks the physiotherapist. “…Leke pointed to just below his hairline at the back of his head, and flapped his hands to indicate ‘everywhere’.”

  Intertwined with Leke’s day-to-day life is his biological parents’ history two decades earlier when Leke was born. Elaine and Oscar’s relationship is doomed from the start: Elaine is trapped between the demands of her boss at the supermarket where she works, and taking care of the baby on her own, because Oscar is in jail for killing an elderly man.

  Cape Town writer Yewande Omotoso

  But it is not as it seems: Oscar’s intention was to quell a family curse, something Leke learns of from a series of letters Oscar wrote to him when he was in jail and Leke was a baby. They tell of his Yoruban roots, his grand- and great-grandparents, and of the hex that predestines that only sons will be born to the family and they will not live to life expectancy. Leke’s somatisation reaches the high-water mark when he finds he cannot read the letters because his eyes can’t focus on the words, although there is nothing wrong with his eyes otherwise.

  Bom Boyexplores the idea of rebirth and the meaning of family against the mise en scène of black magic in a modern world. Omotoso illustrates inimitably what is means to be alone, materially and in mind, and just how thin the fabric of society is.

  Bom Boy is an unusual and laudable debut, marred only by the editor’s massacre of commas and capital letters, and the occasional understandable, but unforgivable, slip in spelling.

  Bom Boy was shortlisted for: 2012 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the M-Net Literary Award in the Film category. It won the 2012 SALA English First-time Published Author Award
  This review first appeared in the Cape Times in November 2011.

• Irish Examiner
  http://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsfilmtv/books/book-review-the-woman-next-door-452727.html
  Word count: 671

  Book review: The Woman Next Door
  Saturday, June 17, 2017Review: Liam Heylin
  A tough-minded wisdom permeates this story of two elderly neighbours. While the cover is garlanded with the bougainvillea flower it could as easily show a bed of nettles or a crown of thorns.

  Yewande Omotoso

  Vintage, £8.99

  The caustic attitudes and bitter words that are exchanged are rife from the beginning. Both women are living alone in an affluent area of Cape Town.

  The relationship between Hortensia, who is black, and Marion, who is white, is quite poisonous.

  Yewande Omotoso eases us into to the strife between them by pitching them in together at a rather stuffy and self-regarding community association meeting.

  It opens like a comedy of manners where the two women battle it out over trifles, tempting the reader to imagine that perhaps the stakes will rise and it wXill become a bigger class of a showdown between these two old warhorses.

  What surprises about the book is the very real depth of observation. While the lightness of tone is maintained there are reservoirs of sadness to be explored in both of their lives. Omotoso is a lovely writer. She weighs out and modulates the details of her stories with consummate skill and ease.

  When Hortensia’s husband Peter dies she stands at his graveside as people she hardly knows approach her to mumble platitudes that she barely hears. I feel like spitting in his grave, she tells us.

  Only then does she tell us of his infidelity. She despairs in particular at his lack of imagination in the lame excuses to cover his affair.

  As she folds these elements in with each other she gradually introduces us to her past, the absolutely unsubtle racism she experienced at university and earlier still her relationship with her mother.

  Keeping with this part of the story she then describes the arrival of Peter in her life and then returns to the much later infidelity and a day when she follows him.

  There is nothing showy about the way in which she moves back and forward in time to select telling details. Maybe it is no more than a good writer does but she does it so well. The juxtaposing of moments of hope and idealism with times of hurt make the novel quite a moving read.

  The black and white aspect of the conflict between Hortensia and Marion is present but is not overstated. There is never a feeling that the characters are ciphers used for the exploration of truth and reconciliation.

  Such concepts are present but the characters run far too deep in terms of their flesh and blood, laughter and tears, for them to become lost in the service of something weighty and conceptual.

  The very real weight of the book comes from the beautifully drawn characters themselves.

  In saying that it is lovely book, Hortensia is in many ways a viper who gives people a hard time of it. But for us readers who didn’t have to live with her for her 80-odd years she is easily worth the trouble.

  While she avoids platitudes and has no place in her armoury for soft soap she does engender our trust that she is reliable in her sense of the truth of things.

  Marion is also a strong character but it is her weaknesses and vulnerabilities that allow us into her world. The real heart of the book is Hortensia’s toughness as she curses God and studiously resists friendship.

  Even as they approach something resembling peace she nails Marion and her white guilt: “You want to talk to me and talk around what is true, circumnavigate whatever horror you prefer not to address. And I’m not here for that. I’ve got my own horrors.”

• Herald Scotland
  http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14508730.The_roots_of_small_mindedness__review_of_The_Woman_Next_Door/
  Word count: 831

  21st May 2016
  The roots of small-mindedness: review of The Woman Next Door
  Nick Major
  The Woman Next Door
  The Woman Next Door
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  The Woman Next Door

  By Yewande Omotoso

  (Fourth Estate, £12.99)

  OCCASIONALLY, fellow readers tell me they dislike a novel because they disapprove of the main characters. Often these characters have upset some moral barometer in the reader’s mind. I usually reply: but what are they like as characters? Nevertheless – and satirists aside – it does take a certain skill in a writer to create a disagreeable protagonist and an enjoyable read. In Yewande Omotoso’s debut novel The Woman Next Door, she puts two pugnacious octogenarians at the centre of a neighbourly feud. Neither woman is particularly endearing, and the is plot strung together haphazardly, yet the novel displays a wit, charm and playful energy that reduces these problems to insignificance.

  Hortensia James and Marion Agostino live on the wealthy and mostly white Katterijn Estate in South Africa. There are striking similarities between the two. Both women have had successful careers at a time when women were not meant to move beyond the kitchen sink; Hortensia was a designer and Marion an architect. Both their husbands have turned out to be dull disappointments, and the women are embittered about it. They both look resolutely forward to death. Finally, they both hate one another, an animosity that stems from jealousy, prejudice and the grievances left over from apartheid.

  The prejudice is racial. Hortensia is a black woman. Worse, she’s a successful black woman. She has to force herself into the Katterijn community meetings, hosted by Marion and full of the white aged. Regardless of their small-mindedness, she keeps going back: "to mock them, to point out to them that they were hypocrites. To keep herself occupied." She has an admirable weathered stubbornness. Her hate, justified as it is in some cases, spreads seemingly to everyone. When her husband dies, she stands at the edge of the grave: "even though she could feel the tears gathering in the corners of her eyes, when a wiry man began shovelling the sand, there was also a part of Hortensia that wanted to tell him to stand back so she could spit."

  Omotoso writes with a sophisticated flippancy. When Hortensia meets Marion’s granddaughter, her response is typically underhand: “lovely little girl … if not that she calls you 'grandmother' I would never have imagined a familial connection.” It’s an interesting scenario. A cruel woman throws a cruel remark in the direction of another cruel woman. Marion has a superior, holier-than-thou attitude to all and sundry. Her hatred and belittling of Hortensia extends beyond her neighbour’s skin colour. It is built on the fact that she designed Hortensia’s home, hoping to live in it one day. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances she ends up next door.

  In the first half of The Woman Next Door, chance happenings and events are flung at the reader like a volley of gunfire. Marion finds out she is bankrupt. Hortensia’s husband dies and leaves in his will news of an addition to the family. All the while the community are alerted to a legal process from the land rights commission, meaning that a white-owned home acquired under apartheid is being claimed by a black family. Hortensia is told her garden is a burial site for former slaves, and a family want to bury their relatives there. She then decides to renovate her home. During the process a crane injures both women and takes the front clean off Marion’s house.

  There is, bewilderingly, more. But Omotoso slides in the political themes skilfully, rather than letting them blare out of a loudspeaker. And in the second half of the novel, the plot calms down. The two women are allowed space to develop an unfriendly friendship. The dialogue between them flourishes. Their banter is reflective of their respective pasts, which are sad and lonely, and told in lucid detail. The novel develops into an insightful and fascinating diptych of two women, with the history of colonialism and slavery lurking in the background.

  By the end of The Woman Next Door, you understand how cruelty and hate can breed within a person. Omotoso achieves this without recourse to sentimentality. The two women do develop some sympathy and humanity, but it is tempered. In one of their final conversations they come to a mutual approximation of each other. “So it’s hell for the both of us,” says Hortensia, with a mixture of sadness and comedy. For this reader at least, it is reassuring to know the pair retain the quarrelsome and inimical aspects of themselves that make them such entertaining characters.

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