<div><div>As Zakes Mda's fifth novel opens, the seaside village of Hermanus is overrun with whale-watchers--foreign tourists determined to see whales in their natural habitat. But when the tourists have gone home, the whale caller lingers at the shoreline, wooing a whale he has named Sharisha with cries from a kelp horn. When Sharisha fails to appear for weeks on end, the whale caller frets like a jealous lover--oblivious to the fact that the town drunk, Saluni, a woman who wears a silk dress and red stiletto heels, is infatuated with him.<br>&nbsp;<br>The two misfits eventually fall in love. But each of them is ill equipped for romance, and their relationship suggests, in the words of <i>The Washington Post,</i> that "the deeper, darker concern here is not so much the fragility of love, but the fragility of life itself when one surrenders wholly to the foolish heart."</div></div>