Women's Speaker Series: Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don't Know the Words

July 23, 2017 - 2:00pm

WSS: Bianca Marais, 7/23/17

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Hum If You Don't Know the Words, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Bianca Marais, author of Hum If You Don't Know the Words, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Sunday, July 23, 2-4 pm.

About Hum If You Don't Know the Words

Perfect for readers of The Secret Life of Bees and The Help, Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a perceptive and searing look at Apartheid-era South Africa, told through one unique family brought together by tragedy.

Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a ten-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred... until the Soweto Uprising, in which a protest by black students ignites racial conflict, alters the fault lines on which their society is built and shatters their worlds when Robin's parents are left dead and Beauty's daughter goes missing.

Told through Beauty and Robin's alternating perspectives, the interwoven narratives create a rich and complex tapestry of the emotions and tensions at the heart of Apartheid-era South Africa. Hum If You Don't Know the Words is a beautifully rendered look at loss, racism, and the creation of family.

About the Author

Bianca Marais is from South Africa and moved to Toronto in 2012. Marais started work on Hum If You Don’t Know the Words while doing her Creative Writing Certificate through the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives with her long-suffering husband as well as a golden retriever, two cats and an overactive imagination.


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