The Woman Next Door by Yewande Omotoso: book review

The Woman Next Door (2016) is set in Cape Town, South Africa.

Two women live next to each other in an affluent suburb of Cape Town, but they could not be more opposite: ‘Hortensia, black and small-boned, Marion, white, large. Marion’s husband dead, Hortensia’s not yet. Marion and her brood of four, Hortensia with no children.’ ‘We are not on the same side,’ says Hortensia to Marion. ‘Whatever you say, I disagree. However you feel, I feel the opposite. At no point in anything are you and I on the same side.’

Hortensia James, a black woman, married Peter, a white man, almost dead. Marion Agostino, a white woman, married Max, a rich Italian, now dead. Both women have had successful careers, now retired. They are in their 80s with too much time on their hands – except to grow their gardens and their hosility towards each other. Bitter enemies.

When Peter dies he leaves a ‘cryptic’ will, which he had recently changed. How will Hortensia react to that? And then, during the first days of mourning for her dearly departed, Hortensia has an accident and unexpected events conspire to bring the two women in one place at one time. How will they both cope with their twenty-year loathing for each other when they are in close proximity? Being neighbours was bad enough; being together is unbearable.

The writing is an easy, comical style, with vibrant visual references: ‘Hortensia sat in a chair, she leaned forward to pull on her skirt, lifting one buttock and then the other, feeling tired even though it was morning.’ And, ‘They drank bad tea as if it were gin, their teeth barred, the muscles in their necks tensed.’

Set in post-apartheid South Africa, the political tensions juxtapose the tension between the two women, giving it a certain dark side. Yet it is a light-hearted, witty, universal story, that could be the same for two different women in any other city, any other country. The themes of difference and tolerance, long-held hatred, and old-age grumpiness, are all entwined in this nice neighbourly novel.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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