Harare Review of Books

272 pp. Published February 11, 2025 by Atlantic Monthly Press. Fiction.

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In this novel that’s both historical fiction and a thriller, Lauren Francis-Sharma tackles the role of truth in achieving reconciliation, contrasted with the desire for reparative or restorative justice. Her characters grapple with historical trauma, both personal and national. The novel serves as an enquiry into the ways we seek justice and peace, for better or for worse.

Prudence is a young American law student on an exchange programme in South Africa in 1996, at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which she attends. At that time, however, she also becomes the victim of a hideous crime. At the hearings, Prudence has met Matshediso (Mat), an unpleasant young man who is carrying the wounds of his own trauma. Through a twist of fate, Mat becomes entangled in the aftermath of the crime against Prudence, and this becomes his way of inserting himself back into her life and using her to confront his past more than twenty years later.

Casualties of Truth presents itself as a deceptively simple story when you first read it, but it rapidly unfurls into a heart-pounding nightmare. Prudence and Mat are the victims of horrific events, but make terrible choices in response, with shocking consequences. The central question of the novel is this: How do you find or make peace in the face of calamity? It’s a question the Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to answer from 1996 on. Whether the Commission succeeded or failed is up for debate; in this novel, Prudence and Mat make their own answers.

Casualties of Truth is brilliant on the two levels it attempts, both as historical fiction and as a thriller. It’s not at all for the faint of heart, however, confronting violence and brutality head-on. When lives are shattered by terrible wrongs, how far is too far to seek closure? Is justice served by peace-making or retribution? Readers will ponder this, and have to decide for themselves.

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