I first picked up one of Zakes Mda's novels (She Plays With the Darkness) in 1995 while I was working in South Africa, shortly after it had won the M-Net award — a big prize in that country. Mda's lyric descriptions of the book's setting, Lesotho, were so evocative that I made the arduous trek — some 800 miles by mini-bus taxi — to see its sun-burned mountains for myself. Back in the United States, I was very stingy with my Mda books. I wouldn't let my friends borrow them since they couldn't be replaced here. But with the recent release of The Madonna of Excelsior (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 258 pages, $23.00), I can afford to be more generous with my lending library.

Like Mda's earlier work, this is a character-driven tale across rough political terrain. Under apartheid, the infamous Immorality Act forbade interracial sex. The book begins in what Mda describes as "the Golden Age of Immorality in the Free State. It had always been popular even before laws were enacted in Parliament to curb it." On any given day, you could find a couple somewhere being brought up on charges.

In the tiny rural town of Excelsior, just eighty-nine kilometers from the Lesotho border, an orgy of nineteen black women and white men was busted in the early '70s. The "coloured" (mixed-race) babies resulting from the orgy were used as evidence in court, one of the white participants shot himself, and the international press had a field day before the regime decided that the case was too embarrassing to fully proceed.

These facts inspired The Madonna of Excelsior, which primarily tells the story of Niki, a fictional character who is prosecuted in the case, Niki's daughter, whose fair skin incriminates her mother and earns her the moniker "Popi" and her son, Viliki, who eventually becomes Excelsior's first black mayor. The first sentence, "All these things flow from the sins of our mothers," is echoed in the last line. Indeed, the value and use of women's bodies is a constant theme. In a particularly humiliating scene, Niki is strip-searched at her job at the butchery. Her boss has resorted to weighing her employees twice a day, and assumes that Niki is hiding meat on her person when her weight has gone up at the end of the day. On numerous occasions throughout the book, Niki's body is presumed guilty. When Niki realizes that her arrest on Immorality charges is imminent, she holds Popi's body over a fire, in hopes of smoking her skin darker. She also shaves her daughter's head to hide the straight texture of her hair, which causes the other black children to call Popi "the one whose head looks like a white woman's buttock."

Niki, the fallen Madonna in this story, poses with Popi for a Catholic priest-cum-painter (another real person inserted into the fictional story). To reinforce just how broad and beautiful the sky and land are in the Free State, descriptions of Father Frans Claerhout's naïve canvases punctuate the text. Mda's books normally have lots of details about the landscape. But this time, he says, "this priest has already painted the landscape for me, [so] why bother describing the landscape? All I needed to do was just describe the paintings. The subjects in the paintings come to life and become my characters."

This constant reminder of how we can choose to see things — from the point of view of an artist, a racist, a politician, a beekeeper — is in contrast with Popi's own limited self-perception for most of the book. As a so-called "coloured" in a town without a coloured community, she feels constant anxiety about her unusual looks.

Popi comes of age as the black majority takes control of the country, and she throws herself into politics. When she first becomes town councilor, it's not clear if she has the strength to stand up for herself. She goes into an internal tailspin imagining how to ask her white counterparts where the restrooms are. But as Popi gains experience and then confidence in her work, she comes to accept herself. Gradually, that even means not hating her pale skin, blue eyes, or her "flowing locks."

Ironically, the one place where the novel stumbles a bit is in some of the dialogue — presumably Mda's skills as a playwright should ensure sharp conversation throughout. On a few occasions, Viliki seems to become a mouthpiece on politically charged subjects, such as the history of the Afrikaans language, or the culture of nonpayment of services. To be sure, what he has to say is interesting — it just doesn't ring true in terms of his voice.

Overall, the prose is a distinctly South African English, with bits of Sesotho, Afrikaans, and even some American style English. Despite the air of authenticity and occasional thrill of decoding foreign words and phrases, few readers will know them all. I used to live in South Africa, but still couldn't visualize what "qokwa grass" looks like, or just what was happening when couples turn "on the same spot in a fast tiekie-draai."

While the details may be exquisitely South African, the situations and characters in Excelsior resonate deeply because they feel so familiar. This is definitely a story worth sharing.