This is at once a story of family life and a record of political awakening – confronting a racist waitress in a South African cafe, watching Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, and voting, momentously, for Nelson Mandela in 1994. Msimang was born in the 70s and experienced an itinerant childhood in exile, living in Zambia, Kenya and Canada, before returning home. Sisonke Msimang’s father left South Africa in 1962 to join the ANC’s “illegal army” against apartheid. Kawamura’s message is clear without being didactic: look around you, embrace those you love and enjoy life while you can. A warm, quirky novel that has sold more than a million copies in Japan, it reflects on life, love, family estrangement and what remains when we are gone with levity and a surprising emotional charge. He accepts the bargain, sacrificing phones, films, clocks – but he draws the line at his beloved cat, Cabbage. That is, until the devil appears, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, and offers him a trade-off: he will be given an extra day of life if he chooses one thing to eliminate from the world. The narrator of this book has a grade four brain tumour, we are told, and only has days to live.
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