A darkly comic and surreal literary novel set in a South African township, where a young crematorium worker and obituarist navigates family betrayal, mythic beasts, and the blurred line between rumor, grief, and survival

A crematorium nightshift, a township in revolt, and a young obituarist haunted by ghosts—living, dead, and imagined. Welcome to Ward 52, where nothing stays buried for long.

Mxabanisi Bulawayo, twenty-one and already burnt out, spends his nights tending the fires at Despatch Crematorium and his days writing unauthorized obituaries for the forgotten and the infamous. His world is a fever dream of township gossip, family betrayals, and the hollow sound of lightweight bodies—dogs, men, and memories—waiting to be claimed or incinerated.

When Mxabanisi’s beloved grandmother dies under strange circumstances, the township’s uneasy peace fractures. Enter Baba Bouka, mythic keeper of beasts and nightmares, who upends everything Mxabanisi thought he knew about inheritance, loyalty, and the stories we tell to survive. Between gossip-soaked shebeens, violence lurking in the streets, and surreal creatures of the night, he stumbles through a landscape where rumor is more real than fact and grief is a shape-shifting shadow.

Unathi Slasha’s novel is a wild, irreverent ride through the absurd and the sacred, the tragic and the darkly comic. Think Lincoln in the Bardo if the spirits wore township dust and cackled at the living. For readers drawn to the uncanny, the unsayable, and the wild poetry of survival, this is a book that refuses to go quietly into the fire.