Sarah Isaacs
R280.00
It’s 1997, three years after the end of Apartheid. Two girls, Leilah, who is mixed race, and Frankie, who is white, are drawn together when they start at a new school, one that remains racially divided despite the country’s new laws. Their friendship deepens and intensifies before suddenly falling apart when each tells the other secrets.
Glass Tower
Glass Tower is a story about a growing friendship between Leilah and Frankie, two teenage newcomers to a middleclass government school in Durban, South Africa. It’s set in the late 1990’s, a period of flux following the country’s first democratic election, and it’s within this context of social change and discomfort that these two very different outsiders come to grips with their changing bodies and place in the world.
Bound together by loneliness, and a joint curiosity in their burgeoning sexuality, Leilah and Frankie come to share their deepest secrets with one another. It’s an unveiling that stretches the limits of their friendship and pushes Leilah to discover parts of herself that without Frankie she would have left in the dark. Issues of race and sexual abuse are raised, but it is the affection between these two characters, and the discoveries they make as they learn and teach one another, that drives the story forward.
