We Belong to the Trees

“Keletso Mopai draws us into a world of mystery where the unchanging landscape reflects the timeless secrets of a brutal society still separated by race, class, and gender.”

– Sheila Kohler, author of Cracks and Once We Were Sisters

“Armed with the unflinching gaze of a realist, the prismatic vision of a poet, and the deep insight of a confidante, Keletso Mopai dares to reach across South Africa’s fragmented social strata, drawing her diverse cast with remarkable candor and compassion. In We Belong to the Trees, she stakes her claim as a generational talent, delivering a book that the country—and, by extension, the world—didn’t know it was waiting for until now.”

– Masande Ntshanga, author of Triangulum

“All the voices in We Belong to the Trees create a stunning chorus that interrogates ownership, power and belonging, and ultimately how a decision in one life can ricochet across so many others. Keletso Mopai has created a gorgeous and intricate structure where the people, the town, and the ghosts shine.”

– 'Pemi Aguda, National Book Award finalist, author of Ghostroots

“Keletso Mopai has crafted something tender and tangible: a lyrical novel of South African fractures, of secrets and waiting, of what lurks unspoken beneath the surface of ordinary lives, the whole rendered in shifting ghost light, in the colours of landscape and memory, in the bruised blues of longing, hurt, and unrequited love. We Belong to the Trees announces a writer of profound vision: one who understands that belonging is never without cost, and that unconfronted ghosts carry long, jealous resonances, reaching back into hidden pasts to make claims on the present.”

– Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust

“Keletso Mopai is the voice of a generation and a writer to watch. We Belong to the Trees is masterful storytelling at its finest.”

– Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don't Know the Words

“Mopai crafts a riveting mosaic from competing points of view, and she delineates the novel’s many voices with well-wrought characterizations and distinctive dialects. It’s an unforgettable tale of a community fighting for its dignity and freedom.”

– Publishers Weekly

“South African writer Mopai’s sharp, sensitive debut novel is largely set in 1996, on a farm in the town of Tzaneen. There, an Afrikaner farmer, Mr. Viljoen, has long bullied his Black assistants and physically abused his wife, Sunette. During an argument one evening, Viljoen shoots and kills one of those assistants, a security guard named Maluka. To reveal the motives behind this incident and its implications, Mopai fractures the story into chapters told from the perspectives of a host of people, including Maluka’s 12-year-old brother, Solly, now left without an immediate family; Maluka’s fiancée, Cola, who’s pregnant when he dies; Solly’s Aunt Esther, who sees echoes of past violence in the incident; and Viljoen and Sunette’s son, Nicolas, who carries scars from the event. With each chapter, the tragedy widens, encompassing the damage to two families and the decades-long resentments over Afrikaners’ usurpation of historically Black land. (“You know, just because Nelson Mandela is now president they think they own everything in this country,” Viljoen grumbles.) Deeper still, Mopai shows how the apartheid era was emotionally repressive, as Sunette, Solly, and Nicolas are all compelled to stifle their affections due to taboos around race and sexuality. Mopai offers just enough history to provide context, but this relatively short novel is dense with characterizations, nearly to the point of airlessness, and closes with an optimism that feels pat. Even so, Mopai’s ambition is admirable, and her capacity to explore the resonances of a single incident suggests a bigger, more sweeping novel is well within her capacity. A powerful, dense story of racism lingering after the end of apartheid.”

– Kirkus Reviews