An absent father dies. Home is no longer so homely. And yet, wherever you go, you cannot escape yourself. Manthipe Moila's captivating debut follows a young woman as she finds her place between the blossoming South Africa of her past and the blustery South Korea of her present. How does one grow in a new place, in a new language? Is it possible to grow new roots, or does pain forever bind us to the past? Drawing on the botanical environment - as well as a self-made jungle of houseplants - Moila meditates on memory and loss, the thrills of exploration, and the journey of becoming. A fresh, inventive and essential new voice in South African literature.

Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her? Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.