Amidst the stories of political violence, rampant inflation, AIDS, poverty and general chaos that make up the sum total of what we in the UK hear about Zimbabwe (especially since most British reporters are banned from entering the country), it’s not difficult to overlook the fact that it’s a place where, even now, millions of people are struggling to get on with their daily lives. Irene Sabatini’s debut novel is a love story, and a story of one woman’s attempt to live a normal existence against the backdrop of Zimbabwean independence and the sometimes gradual, sometimes shockingly abrupt decline of the country of her birth – and it’s a really fantastic book.

Lindiwe Bishop is a diffident teenager at the start of The Boy Next Door, who loves her tactiturn daddy and has a difficult relationship with her mother. They live in a formerly all-white neighbourhood, an example of the kind of social and economic mobility that independence initially made possible, although it’s not enough for her mother, who is a social climber in a country dominated by racial awareness (and where ‘black’ and ‘coloured’ mean different things). The boy next door of the title, white Rhodesian Ian, is suffused in intrigue – only a teenager himself, he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his stepmother, immolated in the back yard, yet the conviction is overturned and he returns to the empty house, reciprocating the interest of the shy Lindiwe – and from this faltering early relationship, everything else flows.

It’s by no means a smooth ride – when they are brought together after Lindiwe’s time at university, they have to contend with the problems of being a mixed-race couple, the hostility of Lindiwe’s mother and the mental illness of Ian’s, and the deterioration around them of their economy and society. Ian ultimately becomes a press photographer, hardly a safe profession in Zim, or South Africa where he does much of his work, and there is the spectre of his drinking and suggested infidelity for Lindiwe to cope with – but with their son, they navigate the murky waters of life in a country that is visibly falling to pieces, the trappings of democracy falling away to reveal a one-party state that will brook no dissenting voices.

The tension that surrounds the central characters, who we come to care for strongly as the book progresses, is palpable – we fear some sudden act, whether targeted or random, could affect their fragile happiness – and Sabatini does a great job of building up this tension while never losing site of the mundane realities of existence in a failing country. She gives us some fascinating insights in to pre-independence Rhodesia, and in to the civil war, via discoveries made by both Ian and Lindiwe about the roles their fathers played in that bloody conflict. Ultimately, though, The Boy Next Door is a love story first and foremost, and it succeeds brilliantly on those terms, while still lamenting the fate of a declining nation. As Ian would undoubtedly say, lekker.

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