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Posted On: October 23rd 2026, 04:06 pm
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News from South Africa! ☀️ THE TALETELLER, the new novel by acclaimed and multiawarded author Masande Ntshanga, will be published by Fourie Botha at Painted Dog Press in 2027. ☀️
Set in South Africa’s Eastern Cape during the early 19th century, at the height of the Mfecane wars and Britain’s colonial incursion into the lands of amaXhosa, THE TALETELLER follows Kholo, a young cowherd and gifted taleteller who discovers a pale-skinned stranger outside Mvuleni, a Xhosa village still beyond colonial contact. A refugee and survivor of the wars, Kholo gets by alongside his father from one day to the next – and it is into this precarious existence that he delivers “the apparition,” the stranger whose disruption will alter not only the course of Kholo’s life, but that of the village and all he knows.
Part historical novel, part war epic, part metaphysical mystery and part Künstlerroman, THE TALETELLER stages a radical inversion of the colonial captivity narrative. Rendered as a speculative ancestral record, it is told by its Mfengu narrator – the name bestowed by amaXhosa on the refugees of the Mfecane – as he grapples with home, exile, love, resistance, art, and what it takes to come to terms with one’s humanity amid the unprecedented violence and loss of a changing world.
All rights outside South Africa are available. ☀️
#masandentshanga #southafrica #southafricanliterature
Set in South Africa’s Eastern Cape during the early 19th century, at the height of the Mfecane wars and Britain’s colonial incursion into the lands of amaXhosa, THE TALETELLER follows Kholo, a young cowherd and gifted taleteller who discovers a pale-skinned stranger outside Mvuleni, a Xhosa village still beyond colonial contact. A refugee and survivor of the wars, Kholo gets by alongside his father from one day to the next – and it is into this precarious existence that he delivers “the apparition,” the stranger whose disruption will alter not only the course of Kholo’s life, but that of the village and all he knows.
Part historical novel, part war epic, part metaphysical mystery and part Künstlerroman, THE TALETELLER stages a radical inversion of the colonial captivity narrative. Rendered as a speculative ancestral record, it is told by its Mfengu narrator – the name bestowed by amaXhosa on the refugees of the Mfecane – as he grapples with home, exile, love, resistance, art, and what it takes to come to terms with one’s humanity amid the unprecedented violence and loss of a changing world.
All rights outside South Africa are available. ☀️
#masandentshanga #southafrica #southafricanliterature
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