The Heart of Redness

Zakes Mda · b. 1948 · South Africa

Why it matters

A village divides between believers and skeptics over a nineteenth-century prophecy that doomed the Xhosa cattle-killing movement, its argument replaying in a modern fight over a casino development. Mda's best-known novel braids two centuries of the same unresolved question.

At a glance

Two interwoven timelines a century apart share character names and require careful tracking.