For the Culture
Book Review: A Family Affair By Sue Nyathi
I can guarantee that you probably know someone who is strikingly similar to one or more of the characters that come in in the novel.
Sue Nyathi’s A Family Affair.
The Mafu family is your typical Southern African family with Abraham, a pastor and the patriarch of the family, Phumla, his wife and the mother of their children, the successful first born, the middle child trying to get her life together and the last born who’s the perfect princess of the family. At face value, they are your perfect family, if you do not take off your rose coloured glasses and look too closely that is. A Family Affair follows the lives of the Mafu family, from the happy events to the really depressing ones. The relationship dynamics between the main characters and their significant others as well as each other are brought out, with a whole lot of conflict, drama and of course, spicy romance! As the picture of perfection begins to crack, how long will the respected Mafu family be able to keep up appearances?
From the very first sentence of Sue Nyathi’s novel, I was hooked and I already found myself resonating with Zandile, one of the main characters in the story. From the very beginning, readers should expect to be immediately thrust into African family drama that’s bound to keep one turning the pages, no matter how long they’ve been at it! The characters, the events, the beliefs brought up, all these will definitely have you feeling a really wide range of emotions.
A word of caution though, to the more sensitive readers, the novel has sexual content but not to worry, nothing too graphic and “out there”, just don’t share the book with any twelve year old’s!
One thing that immediately struck me about A Family Affair was that I found the characters extremely relatable and real. I can guarantee that you probably know someone who is strikingly similar to one or more of the characters that come in in the novel.
A Family Affair is bound to take its readers on an emotional rollercoaster ride as they explore the ups and downs of romantic and familial relationships, with some really unexpected plot twists that will have you slamming the book shut so you can reel properly before quickly opening it again to find out what happens next! Sue Nyathi really succeeded in describing the characters and conflicts in her novel in a very emotive way while keeping her writing simple and straight forward so readers wouldn’t need dictionaries by their side to understand what was happening.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman of childbearing age must be in want of a husband.” Sue Nyathi, A Family Affair.
I’d honestly give this book five stars. I enjoyed reading it from the very beginning to the end and I was always ready to find out what happened next. At no point did I feel like putting the book aside because it was not interesting anymore. Sue Nyathi had me hooked and emotionally invested from the very beginning to the very end of the story. If you haven’t read the book before, I strongly encourage you to! You can find it on the link below:
