Toloki is a "professional mourner" in a vast and violent city of the new South Africa. Day after day, he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy, Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances, this elegant short novel provides a brutal, magical, funny, and painful picture of South Africa today.Author Biography: ZAKES MDA, novelist and playwright, has received every major South African prize for his work. Born in 1948, he has been a visiting professor at Yale University and the University of Vermont. He is writer-in-residence at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg. He is also the author of The Heart of Redness.