Coconut by Kopano Matlwa

It took me a little while to get into this novel. You have to have a great deal of background knowledge about South African race relations, and South Africa in general, to fully understand where the narrators are coming from. However, it is beautifully written, almost in a stream of consciousness style but incorporating dialogs, straight narrative, and memories. It is actually two intersecting stories: one is the story of an upper-middle-class girl, Ofilwe, who is for all intents and purposes perfectly comfortable in her upper-middle-class life, but whose brother, Tshepo, is starting to pay closer attention to issues of race and class. Towards the end of Ofilwe's story she starts to realize that, for all of her efforts, she will never entirely fit in to the society she affiliates herself with. Fiks is a working-class girl from the townships who covets the trappings of upper-middle-class life but is working in a restaurant serving the very people she wants to be someday. Both Ofilwe and Fiks experience racism and sexism--the white males in this book are not especially kind. There are also interesting discussions about losing Xhosa culture and language. The book is a fascinating portrait of race and class in South Africa, but again, you need a little bit of background information. I'd recommend reading The Syringa Tree first, which gives a bit more backstory.