Description
“I imagined a dying person’s last breath as something resembling an exclamation mark, distinct and hanging mid-air like an interrupted thought. My older sister Fikile’s last breath before she dies is nothing of the sort. There is no rattling noise at the back of her throat. No relentless twitching. No clinging to life. Fikile dies with no more fuss than a switch of a light bulb.”
With her sister, Fikile, dead from breast cancer, her father long gone, her mother emerging from years of slumber, and her younger brother, Mbuso, consumed with rage that refuses to settle, Anele Mbuza has no choice but to collect herself and grow up. Or does she? Because, if truth be told, she has not signed up to be her family’s caretaker. Surely her dreams are valid? The Ones with Purpose is a remarkable story of family, disappointment, sacrifice, forgiveness, and love.
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0843-5
Date Released: April 2018
Pages: 269
Format: Paperback
Dimensions: 13cm x 19.8cm
Published By: Kwela Books
Author
NOZIZWE CYNTHIA JELE
Nozizwe is the author of two novels. Happiness is a Four-Letter Word (2010) which won the Best First Book category (Africa region) in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2011 and 2011 M-Net Literary Award in the Film Category and was shortlisted for the 2011 Booksellers Choice Award and Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English Fiction (2011). The book was adapted into a film with the same title and released at the South African box office in 2016. The Ones with Purpose (2018) shortlisted for the following South African literary prizes: Sunday Times Literary Awards Barry Ronge Fiction Prize 2019 and long listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize 2020.
Nozizwe is one of the founding members of the Happiness Literary Foundation an artist-run, not-for-profit organisation that fosters and promotes the culture of reading and writing within communities and invests in the professional development of local artists. Nozizwe holds a MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia (UEA).
