Sometimes a book comes along which grabs readers by the throat and does not let go. Lauren Francis-Sharma’s Casualties of Truth is that type of novel. Tense from its opening pages, built on complex and fraught historical events, and constantly asking difficult questions of both its protagonist and its readers.
Casualties of Truth opens in 2018. Prudence Wright and her husband Davis are driving through a Washington DC hailstorm to attend a dinner with one of Davis’s new employees. Prudence and Davis are a successful, professional couple with a young son, Roland, who is on the autism spectrum. Prudence has left a very lucrative and successful career as a management consultant to raise Roland. The dinner itself is fraught, not least of which because it raises for Prudence memories of a legal internship she did in South Africa over thirty years before, during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Following that difficult and stressful dinner things get worse for Prudence as a traumatic experience that she went through during her time in South Africa and its aftermath come back to haunt her.
Casualties of Truth is a thriller in which the pressure only ever ratchets upwards. Prudence is caught between her desire to move away from the person she was thirty years before (which at the time saw her trying to distance herself from a former persona), and her deep understanding of what it is to want to avenge an injustice. The book takes readers into the horrors of the Apartheid era and asks them to consider what justice might look like all these years later. But in doing so Francis-Sharma does not make things simple, she makes readers complicit and then guilty, riding the rollercoaster of emotions with Prudence as she is cajoled, manipulated but also blackmailed into drawing on an aspect of her personality that sits just below the surface. Every character in this novel is compromised in some way, everything is a shade of grey.
Casualties of Truth explores historical injustices but also brings them forward into the present day and explores the insidiousness of the racism that drove Apartheid and its ongoing legacy. But setting aside the history and the tension and the violence, Francis-Sharma has also delivered an intensely human novel with a couple of believably flawed, driven characters at its centre. Casualties of Truth is the best kind of thriller – one that makes you think deeply even while rapidly turning the pages and one that refuses to let readers off the hook or give any easy answers.
Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma
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