What happens when the past does not resolve, does not leave? In Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth, Prudence Wright’s seemingly peaceful present is interrupted by a figure from her past who reminds her of the events of a summer she’d long buried in memory.
As the novel opens in 2018, Prudence and her husband, Davis, are out to dinner, joined by a new colleague of his whom Prudence has never met—except, she has met him before. In fact, Matshediso is well known to Prudence from the time she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996, in the midst of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s hearings. Moving between Prudence’s present with her husband and son in Washington and her summer in Johannesburg, each tense scene brings secrets Prudence had hoped to leave behind closer to the surface.
Fast-paced, engaging and surprising, Casualties of Truth has some elements of a thriller, while examining whether truth is enough, whether the past can be escaped and whether the personal and political are ever separate. For Prudence, the legacies of racism and apartheid have shaped her own path as well as the intertwining histories of the U.S. and South Africa. The life she’s made in Washington is a dynamic layer of the story, too, as she considers her choice to suspend her career to spend more time raising her autistic son, and as pressure from Matshediso complicates her relationship with Davis.
Emerging connections between the past and present keep the novel unpredictable, and the big questions it raises will stay open well after it closes.
