Casualties of Truth, by Lauren Francis-Sharma, is a 252-page dash of a novel, weaving together historical, expansive tensions of South African Apartheid with a thrilling revenge plot.
The novel moves between two timelines: 1996 Johannesburg, South Africa, and 2018 Washington, DC. In 1996, Prudence, the main character, is a young law student on a study abroad internship where she documents the post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. Pulling from her own time in South Africa during the Truth and Reconciliation period, Francis-Sharma’s descriptions of the hearings, the wrongdoings, and the cultural/political reckonings in 1990s South Africa are chilling and intimate.
Prudence’s time in South Africa resurfaces against her will in 2018 in the form of Mateshido, an acquaintance she met during the hearings. Mateshido has tracked Prudence down to ask her assistance righting wrongs she would rather leave in the past.
As the stakes rose throughout the novel, I had a harder and harder time putting down the book. I was absorbed with Prudence’s internal conflict about how to proceed with Mateshido, weighing her own ideas about justice against the potential for a devastating fallout with a single misstep.
The twists are smart, the characters are prickly, and the pace is fast.
It took hours after flipping the last page to begin digesting the book. Thoughts, questions, and potential Google searches swirled around my brain in the best way.
I love to think about books in terms of what questions they ask the reader, and in the aftermath of this novel, a fascinating question emerged for me that I can’t stop thinking about. What do I do when the answer to the question, “How far would I go?” is Much farther than I think?
Michaela Lavelle loves people, books, and spaces where those things can come together. She is the Director of the Quechee/Wilder Libraries in Hartford and can be found playing volleyball, taking long walks, or attempting to bake without a recipe when she is not in the stacks.