Gillian McAinsh reviews Sex, Lies and Stellenbosch by Eva Mazza
This saucy new novel by a Stellenbosch drama teacher and writer has been bouncing up the bestseller lists in South Africa since its release earlier in February.
Sex, Lies & Stellenbosch by Eva Mazza is home-grown chick-lit filled with steamy scenes of love and deceit in the winelands of the Western Cape.
It’s the story of middle-aged housewife Jen, the mother of two rather unlikeable young adult children, who is devastated to catch her handsome wine farmer husband cheating on her.
Her seemingly perfect life starts to fall to pieces and the story twists and turns as Mazza draws back the grape curtain and allows the reader to peek inside.
For those who know Stellies, many of the details ring true such as the sheer wealth of so many residents with, for example, a reference to the pain of having invested in ill-fated Steinhoff shares.
Although the novel is set on a winefarm and not on the Stellenbosch University campus, topical subjects such as a student romance with a lecturer are included.
It’s also not stretching the bounds of fact to include a secret upmarket “poker club”, where middle-aged businessmen go for sexual relief and – although the author notes the book was “written as fiction to protect the innocent” – this and other details must have caused quite a stir in the town.
Mazza’s prose starts as it means to go on, diving into a raunchy sexual encounter in the first chapter and the breathy tempo continues until the (not totally unexpected) happy ending.
The dramatic talents of its author are evident in the racy pace of Sex, Lies & Stellenbosch – Mazza also has written a play which was staged in Johannesburg in 2017 – and her first novel is now sitting at No2 on the SA fiction bestseller lists.
(Just for interest, the top seller is The Binding by English novelist Bridget Collins, then Sex, Lies and Stellenbosch followed by Afrikaans thriller Prooi by Deon Meyer, another resident of the Western Cape.)
Fun-loving book club members and those looking for a light beach read are likely to lap it up.
Sex, Lies and Stellenbosch by Eva Mazza is published by MFBooks Joburg and the recommended retail price is R130.