Piggy Boy's Blues, by Nakhane Touré

Known for his music, SAMA award-winning musician Nakhane Toure is changing tune with the release of his debut novel, Piggy Boy's Blues. The novel, which has been described as reading fragments of a recurring dream, centres on the disastrous consequences of a man's return to his Eastern Cape home town of Alice. Toure's work is poetic with sensuous prose. His style delighted publisher, Thabiso Mahlape, who has described him as an 'all-round artist'.

An overarching theme of the book, Toure says, is its exploration of the spiritual lives of black people. "You can see it in the characters, whether they are good or bad." There is also the normalisation of gay sex, which Toure achieves by "writing about it in the plainest language possible".

Toure credits K Sello Duiker as "having opened up the gates for me to walk through". He locates the three main protagonists of his book via a retelling of family trees. Able and deft, with an already recognisable voice, he admits to being "inspired by the episodic structure of the Bible, especially Genesis".

Author Nakhane Toure
ISBN 9781928337089
Format Paperback
Pages 157p.