The Jacaranda Months

In the purple-hushed silence of a Pretoria archive, a lonely gay archivist named Thapelo Mokoena stumbles upon a hidden diary from 1994 – the year South Africa voted for its first democratic president. The diary belongs to “S.”, a young white Afrikaans man from Waterkloof, whose secret love for another boy is met not with understanding, but with electroshock “conversion” therapy and a forced marriage.

Haunted by the echoes of a life unlived, Thapelo begins a secret conversation across thirty years. He writes back to the dead. And in doing so, he confronts his own carefully constructed shell – the polite smiles at family braais, the empty Grindr profile, the cat named after a liberation hero because he cannot have a son.

When a rough-hewn Afrikaner neighbour named Henk notices Thapelo crying through the wall of their Melville flat, an unlikely friendship deepens into something neither man has language for. But can two men from opposite sides of South Africa’s painful history learn to touch without fear? And can Thapelo give “S.” – Stefan – the one thing he never had: a witness to his courage?

The Jacaranda Months is a tender, emotionally intelligent novel about the cost of the closet, the violence of silence, and the quiet revolution of a single honest handheld in the jacaranda rain. For readers of Call Me by Your Name and The Argonauts, this is a distinctly South African story of love after apartheid – and the diaries that set us free