Publications
Partners
BOOK: Onion Tears by Shubnum Khan (Picador Africa)
This republished first novel is still an immersive and rollicking good read 13 years later. Shubnum Khan has been widely recognised as a writer who has developed fully from her early creative writing class at Durban's UKZN. We have recently had the pleasure of reading The Lost Love of Akbar Manzil, and those who missed Onion Tears in 2011 can now easily find a copy. The latter was shortlisted for two literary prizes when it first came out: the UJ Debut Fiction Prize and the Penguin Prize for African Writing.
Khan uses the structural device of rotating her story between members of one family; it is written in the third person, but so intimately that one feels it's a first-person account. Her three main characters are two women and a girlchild of the Mirza family, three generations. Khadeejah is the grandmother at the time of the main events of the story, but her portions contain many flashbacks to her own childhood with her many siblings in a flat in Bronkhorstspruit where her newly emigrant parents had a general dealer shop.
