Dub Steps — Andrew Miller

The plants were pushing the houses back, each millimetre of growth adding to each tendril a new triumph of organic force. ‘We're just starting summer rains, right?' Babalwa asked rhetorically. ‘It's October, right? And it rains hard up here?' We were driving through the matchbox houses of Katlehong. ‘Very.' ‘What you reckon â€" two years? Three? Before everything is gone?' Dub Steps has a strange long aftertaste. It is science fiction with ordinary characters trying to understand what it is to be alive. People have gone, suddenly, inexplicably, and the remaining handful have to find each other and start again. Nature comes back, Johannesburg becomes wonderfully overgrown, designer pigs watch from the periphery walls, and the small group of survivors have to find ways of living with their own flaws and the flaws of each other. There are no clichés in this book, but there is plenty of humor, originality and a gripping, unusual interrogation of the ordinary but really extraordinary fact of being alive.