Synopsis: "A young girl whose name we are told "means Sorrow" [is] saved from a wretched existence in an unidentified shanty town known only as the Jungle by Zach, a compassionate teacher and the slayer of shadows to whom the title refers. Zach stands in continual opposition to both the hopeless poverty and despair of the Jungle ghetto and the ruthless "Jakkals", gangsters who prey relentlessly on its suffering inhabitants. In the course of the novel, Zach's wife and unborn baby are savagely slaughtered and "Sorrow", whom he has renamed Marinda, is raped and impregnated by two unknown men whom she suspects of operating on orders from the "Jakkals". Marinda, who sees ghosts and can talk to cockroaches, accesses what might be seen as the traditionally feminine powers of witchcraft to draw a circle of protection about their home. At first, she seems to do this successfully, but the menstrual blood with which she anoints Zach's door is soon overlaid by the blood of his slaughtered infant, metaphorically emphasizing that nurture and regeneration can never be possible in this anti-utopian future. Torn apart by their separate and all-consuming experiences of trauma, Zach and Marinda withdraw into their separate griefs. Finally, however, Marinda goes in search of Zach and they are reunited beyond the Jungle, in an unnamed and perhaps atemporal liminal space where there are clean shores and a river flows into the sea. Here Marinda comes to believe that the child born of her rape is, in some spiritual sense, also Zach's child[...] The final paragraph of the novel then presents the unborn child laying violent claim to the years ahead." (source: Brown, M. (2014). Guilt, guns, girls and ghettos: Adjacent futures in selected post- apartheid fantasies. Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 51(2), 28–39.)