Buy Here:

Amazon Bookshop

Synopsis:

Serial  the podcast meets The Other Black Girl in a haunted house, as young African author disappears after being invited to an exclusive writing residency, and her sister is left only with a true crime podcast to help her uncover the truth about what really happened…

Anaya Sebeya is missing.

Before her disappearance, Anaya was a brilliant a rising star. Invited to a prestigious writing residency at Günter Huis, an eerie colonial mansion on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, Anaya was supposed to craft the next great African literary masterpiece—and so were four other young, emerging writers, all competing for the grand prize. But Anaya never made it home.

When a sensationalized true crime podcast about Anaya emerges, claiming to reveal everything that happened at Günter Huis, her sister Ranewa is both skeptical and furious. But with each surreal episode, Ranewa begins to piece together a truth worse than she ever could have imagined…

At Günter Huis, Anaya’s nightmares consume her. Time slips away from her. Günter Huis inflicts distorted visions and terrible supernatural visitations, pushing Anaya to tell a story no one dares. But exorcising the house’s endless cycle of evil requires a sacrifice that neither Anaya nor her fellows are ready to make.

In House of Margins, award-winning Motswana author Tlotlo Tsamaase delivers a mesmerizing story of a young generation facing colonialism’s cultural legacy in Africa.

Review:

This could very possibly be my Book of the Year.

House of Margins is Tlotlo Tsamaase’s second novel. Her first novel Womb City is interesting but a story that feels as if she tries to add too many things into one novel. In the end it is good but a bit unfocused. With House of Margins, she tells a story of Anaya, a woman who goes to Günter Huis to compete for the Günter Prize for African Women’s Literature, a writing competition that she never returns from. Her sister, Renewa, is trying to get to the bottom of her sister’s disappearance and learns that another of the contestants from this competition is releasing a true crime podcast specifically about what might have happened to Anaya. The mystery unfolds through first person narrative from Rewena, Anaya’s story told in her voice through the podcast, and a few epistolary style moments of telling everything that happens at Günter Huis.

In the beginning, the novel seems like a normal novel of tropes. Girls in a cutthroat writing competition, narratives written using true crime podcasts, and a house that is haunted seems to be novels that I have read several times in the last few years, but another element is introduced that turns House of Margins from a run-of-the-mill haunted house story to one that explores the importance of ancestry, of history, of spiritual battles, and of the effort that white people spends to shape stories told throughout the world. Anaya’s story for the competition is about the history of the region where the Günter Huis sits, the way that many different tribes are invaded, raped, and killed by various groups of colonizers. It does not happen once but several times, to several tribes, and this manuscript that Anaya writes, which seems to be surrealism but is truthfully the narrative history of the house and land itself, is critiqued by the mentors and the prize committee as something too harsh to be published, that people do not like to think about colonization and what the invaders actually did to the native people of the region. She is told to tone it down, and this advice is because the prestigious prize, the Günter Prize for African Women’s Literature, is sponsored by the Günter family, a family of Germans who settled in Africa and who own the house. One of the definitions of the German word Günter is “battle,” and this seems to be what everyone in the house ends up doing, not only battling to get their story told in a way that is pleasing to the prize jury, not only a battle against one another because there is only one prize, but it is a battle of the spirit, the memories of the house being the biggest villain of them all. 

I love so many aspects of the story, and even though I was a little off-put at the beginning because of how the story is being told and me feeling like this story is probably going to be the same story I have read before, the story proves me wrong. House of Margins grows, becomes more surreal, more intense, and more emotionally charged as the story develops. I feel like the reader has to have some sense of spirituality to get into the novel, to be open to the idea that there could be spirits in another dimension who are trying to get the attention of the characters. There are also a few of the contestants who believe in God and calls out to Him for help, and this does become a plot point in the story. The battles that these young contestants go through are compelling, and I will also say this is one of the more frightening books I have read in a long time. I have read plenty of horror and weird stuff, but there is something special about House of Margins, a realness and a creepiness in the action. This is a testament to Tlotlo Tsamaase’s story telling, but it is also because the story feels real, that the emotionally charged motivations of everyone in the book allows anything to happen and the actions make sense, regardless of how improbable they might be. 

I have talked a great deal about this novel to my friends and family because it really does have an impact on the reader. The moments when Anaya’s manuscript is done and her mentor on the prize committee says that it needs to be toned down seems like something that Tsamaase might have been told a time or two but has chose to ignore. This story is very much a horror story written by someone who has a firm foundation in speculative fiction. There are weird things that happen throughout, and with the roots of the story firmly based in Africa, there is little doubt that some notes have been written to Tsamaase’s stories need “toned down”. I have loved everything that Tlotlo Tsamaase has published. From her short stories to House of Margins, everything she writes is unique, compelling, and absolutely masterful. Finishing this book makes me want to reread Womb City simply because I need more of her writing. 

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.