Imraan Coovadia’s New Novel: High Low In-between (with Excerpt)

by Emily on Jun 5th, 2009

Set in KwaZulu-Natal, Imraan Coovadia’s latest offering, High Low In-between, charts the relationship between Nafisa, who is coming to terms with her husband’s murder, and the people around her: her dysfunctional family as well as her patient, Millicent Dhlomo, who is dying of AIDS.

With gathering momentum, the novel exposes the reader to Nafisa’s world of organ donation, greedy AIDS denialists, quack doctors, bribes and the looming threats by the South African Revenue Service. Having been part of the struggle, Nafisa now faces the sinister complications of the post-apartheid dispensation and finds herself ostracised once more.

We learn with Nafisa what it is to live in a time of various plagues: in which a slip of a needle is a prospective death, in which your husband can be murdered because he received a kidney he didn’t know was acquired illicitly, in which death by Aids has become a currency in the hands of the morally bereft and the politically expedient, and in which acquiring, concealing, and channelling funds determines the lives and prospects of us all.

From High Low In-between, page 27

Jadwat was correct. Nafisa smiled to be reminded of the discrepancy. She had no mysteries. Even Jadwat, Jadwat the fool, knew who she was. The large room on the ground floor had belonged to her son almost twenty years earlier, a span of time so great that surely it could not apply to her own existence.

Nafisa felt she must have slept through these twenty years. Her understanding had not caught up with them. Her son’s long absence, his experiences in San Francisco and around the world, were facts she hadn’t accommodated. She was slow, she knew, to work out what happened around her. Others were rapid.

To read further (pdf download)

“A wise book, full of provocative insights.”
– Vikas Swarup, author of Slumdog Millionaire

“Imraan Coovadia has a unique and marvellously talented voice. High Low In-between effortlessly extended my capacity to imagine the moral inner world of the kind of character I often wonder about.”
– Antjie Krog

About the author

Born in Durban and formerly resident in New York, Imraan Coovadia now lives in Cape Town, where he lectures in the English Department at the University of Cape Town. He has taught 19th Century Studies and Creative Writing at a number of US universities.

His debut novel, The Wedding, published simultaneously in the US and SA in 2001 has been translated into Hebrew and Italian. It was shortlisted for the 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Award, Ama-Boeke Prize (2003), IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award (2005), and was chosen as book of the week by Exclusive Books (South Africa) and Asian Week.com.

He is most recently the author of Green-eyed Thieves, published by Umuzi in 2006, which was runner-up for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2007.

Book details