Novelist Zakes Mda is considered among the pre-eminent chroniclers of South Africa's postapartheid era, though his historically rooted fiction strays into fantastic realms, quite unlike the unflinching realism of his peers Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee. In his sixth novel, Cion, Toloki — the South African professional mourner and hero of Mda's first novel, Ways of Dying — arrives in Athens, Ohio (not coincidentally where Mda teaches at the University of Ohio), on Halloween night, 2004. The novel spans the ensuing year, as Toloki takes up residence in the neighboring hamlet of Kilvert with the idiosyncratic Quigley family and begins probing into the family and the town's history.

Moving against the backdrop of John Kerry's presidential defeat, evangelist Pat Robertson's call for Hugo Chavez's assassination, and Hurricane Katrina, the inquiring Toloki becomes fascinated with the community's quilt-making traditions, which reveal to him the stories of the family's ancestors: two escaped slaves, Nicodemus and Abednego, their mother the Abyssinian Queen, and the elder Quigley, an Irish scoundrel who winds up enslaved at the same Virginia slave farm. The residents of this impoverished, former coal-mining region — located just north of the Ohio River, which once marked the boundary between free and slave states — are of mixed Native American, African American, and European ancestry. Unfamiliar with the practice of professional mourning, Kilvert residents treat Toloki as a curiosity until he mesmerizes them with a performance at a village funeral. Toloki's relationships with the evangelical matriarch Ruth, the wayward son Obed, the reclusive sister Orpah, and the silent Mr. Quigley deepen as he serves as a mediator between members of this closely knit but emotionally fraught family.

Mda's jovial prose and richly eccentric characters can't obscure the fact that Cion is a political novel. Like Karl Rossmann, the discombobulated protagonist of Kafka's aborted first novel, Amerika , Toloki offers an outsider's perspective on American society, forming connections between South Africa's apartheid-era suspension of habeas corpus and detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, while illuminating the apparent contradiction of destitute Ruth's staunch faith in President George W. Bush.

-H.G. Masters