This Thing Called the Future

Fourteen-year-old Khosi yearns for this thing called the future-- something better than sickness and superstition in a shanty town. Does she want too much? A stunning YA coming-of-age story set in post-apartheid South Africa.

Khosi lives with her beloved grandmother, her little sister, and her weekend mother in a matchbox house on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. In this shantytown, it seems like somebody is dying all the time. Billboards everywhere warn of the disease of the day. When Khosi's mother turns sick, she refuses any care. No traditional Zulu medicine. When Khosi tries to take her mother to a western doctor, her mother tells her not to bother and to stay in school. Only education will save Khosi and her sister from the poverty and ignorance of the old Zulu ways.

School, though, is not bad. There is a boy her own age there, Little Man Ncobo, and she loves his blue-black lips and the color of his skin, so much darker than her own. But he mocks her when a witch's curse and a neighbor's accusations send her scrambling off to the sangoma's hut in search of a healing potion. She doesn't know what it is that makes the blood come up from her choking lungs. Witchcraft? A curse? AIDS? What must she do to save her mother from wasting before their eyes?

J.L. Powers is a novelist and scholar. Her recent novel This Thing Called the Future is a coming of age story set in post-Apartheid South Africa. Her previous anthology was Labor Pains and Birth Stories. She holds master's degrees in African History from State University of New York-Albany and Stanford University, and won a Fulbright-Hayes to study Zulu in South Africa, and served as a visiting scholar in Stanford's African Studies Department in 2008 and 2009. She lives in San Francisco's Bay area.