Strange Nervous Laughter

March 9, 2009
The lives of six people collide in McNulty's magical realism–infused debut set in the South African city of Durban during the hottest summer on record. Beth, a cashier at a small grocery, is on duty when the store is robbed. She and the two customers, Mdu and Meryl, are unharmed but shaken. Soon after the robbery, Beth—who floats when she's happy—begins dating Pravesh, an undertaker who can sense death by a tingling at the back of his knees and heat in his ears. Mdu, who can speak to whales, meets Aisha, who's so caught up in her dreams that reality fails to register. Meryl, an assistant at Guinness World Records, is sent to interview Harry, who is trying to set a world record for eating only green foods. Though the characters fall in and out of love, the novel is not a romance but rather an examination of love, the ways we respond to it and how we delude ourselves about our choices. While the themes may sound weighty, McNulty's light touch and evocative descriptions of Durban make for an absorbing read.

May 1, 2009
A South African debut that tracks six quirky characters, supposedly in search of romance, piles on the charm, magic and whimsy.

Cynical Meryl responds to niceness with blistering scorn; undertaker Pravesh senses death and likes to paint corpses' toenails; Mdu can communicate with whales; Aisha is a loner with a life of ritual; Beth, who floats when happy, scares men away by falling in love too hard and fast; and garbage man Harry, who only eats green food, has a smell that attracts broken things and people. There are no easy pairings among this group of odd, damaged singletons whose story starts with a robbery at a grocery store during the hottest summer Durban has ever known. In a drifting social comedy with philosophical overtones, ideas of love are punctured repeatedly by depression, despair, bad smells and worse lovers. Beth and Pravesh's relationship ends when he starts an affair with Meryl. Beth goes on to fame and fortune as a motivational speaker while Pravesh ends up the laughable fan of a pop princess. Mdu and Aisha experience a period of loving rapture until she leaves him, swimming out to sea, and he sails after her. Meryl and Harry become engaged despite her profound misgivings.

Strenuous efforts at lightness are impeded by an obtrusive authorial presence and an excess of eccentricity.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2009
McNultysunapologetically whimsical tale follows the intersecting lives of six eccentric characters as peculiar obsessions, unexpected romances, and isolated lives collide following a random burglary in a local grocery store. One of the more engaging story lines follows the lovelorn Beth, a timid cashier at Handy Green Grocers, who literally floats when she is happy, especially after she becomessurreptitiously enamoredof Pravesh, a brooding undertaker with a fetish for toenails and teenage pop stars. Meryl, a tightly wound Guinness Book representative, ferociously guards every emotion until she meets Harry, an idiosyncratic garbage man who steals tips at the local diner and surrounds himself with the discarded items he finds in the dump. The lonely Mdu is content to communicate only with whales until, after the burglary, he meets and falls in love with Aisha, a dreamy orphan whose tears turn into prismatic beads when she sleeps. Set against a sweltering South African summer, McNultys heady debut twines her characters unusual circumstances as they construct and destruct the joy and displeasure of loves erratic consequences.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)