In his memoir Sometimes There Is A Void award-winning South African author Zakes Mda chronicles his youth from boyhood in Soweto to his exile and coming of age in Basutoland (now Lesotho).

An accomplished playwright, poet, and novelist who teaches creative writing at Ohio University, Mda describes an adolescence filled with apartheid-era racism, religion, girls, comic books and outlawed political literature, and a long love affair with the music of Antonín Dvorák and John Coltrane.