Muriel at Metropolitan

Miriam Tlali’s short first novel – banned on its first publication in South Africa in 1975 – is a slice-of-life story about Muriel, a young black woman who works as a typist and bookkeeper in a bustling hire-purchase business in downtown Johannesburg in the late 1960s. Peopled by a motley crew of characters, all of whom are indelibly marked by the appalling racial politics of the time, this book is by turns angry, elegiac and at times, darkly funny.