Room 207

by Kgebetli Moele

Overview

Room 207 is set in and around a dilapitated building in Hillbrow. For more than ten years, six guys live in room 207 of this block of flats: they are Matome, Molamo, Zulu-boy, D’nice, Modishi and the nameless narrator. By day, they are hustlers – they hustle production companies, they have their own music company, they survive. At night, they party, and they’re pushing corruption, as the narrator would say. They are conmen, and they are streetwise. By day, and by night, women flock around them. Room 207 is a startling novel – the prose is dense and some of it reads like poetry. It paints a vivid, engrossing picture of six friends in Hillbrow, and their sense of hopelessness – despair in fact – of having to compromise their lives. They are artists, these men, but they have to make a living. Otherwise, fate would call them back home – not driving their own BMW, but leaving the way they arrived in the ‘dream city’: in a taxi, with empty pockets, and nothing to show for their years in Joburg.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780795703416
Publisher:	Kwela
Publication date:	06/21/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	313 KB

About the Author

KGEBETLI MOELE has been a writer since he started high school. He currently lives in Pretoria, and is studying through Unisa. Moele’s debut novel, Room 207, was published by Kwela Books in 2006. It was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book (Africa) in 2007. It was the joint-winner of the Herman Charles Bosman Prize for English fiction as well as joint-winner of the University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing in the debut category. Room 207 also received an honorable mention in the English category of the M-Net Book Prize. It has been translated into French and Italian.

Read an Excerpt

Room 207 is set in and around a dilapitated building in Hillbrow. For more than ten years, six guys live in room 207 of this block of flats: they are Matome, Molamo, Zulu-boy, D’nice, Modishi and the nameless narrator. By day, they are hustlers – they hustle production companies, they have their own music company, they survive. At night, they party, and they’re pushing corruption, as the narrator would say. They are conmen, and they are streetwise. By day, and by night, women flock around them. Room 207 is a startling novel – the prose is dense and some of it reads like poetry. It paints a vivid, engrossing picture of six friends in Hillbrow, and their sense of hopelessness – despair in fact – of having to compromise their lives. They are artists, these men, but they have to make a living. Otherwise, fate would call them back home – not driving their own BMW, but leaving the way they arrived in the ‘dream city’: in a taxi, with empty pockets, and nothing to show for their years in Joburg.