It’s difficult to say whether Marion Molteno’s Commonwealth Writer’s Prize-winning novel, If You Can Walk, You Can Dance, is about Africa, about women or about music. The obvious answer is all three, but that might be wrong. Because even without sacrificing the realities of her setting – Africa and London – Molteno creates a universally appealing work precisely because it explores the place music can have in a person’s, more specifically, a woman’s life.

This is the kind of novel that makes you think, after reading it, of your place in the world as well as the human condition – overused as the term is. And for all the drama and love that there is in this work which begins with a young woman leaving South Africa with a boyfriend she no longer wishes to be with, this book brings you back unequivocally to the beauty of music.

Published in 1998.