SOMETIMES A YARN is cast with such surety and conviction that it is able to touch a whole universe in just five hours of unstoppable reading. This is what you can expect in Tracey Hawthorne’s debut novel, Flipped, which was published by Modjadji Books in 2023.

It tells of an event. A stone misplaced. A kind of throwaway adjunct to a story about youth and recklessness, pranks and the kind of things we, as human beings get up to, before we come of age. And yet the work is so unutterably cleverly constructed that, like a Greek tragedy, that narrative slips into the background of your sensibility as you read, quickly, about teenagers on a bend. About a life of someone else, unexpectedly on a thread. When you reach its denouement, a feeling of realisation and a kind of horror fills you from head to toe with goosebumps. This is how a novel should be made.

The writing is compassionate without being maudlin and descriptive without being unnecessarily pedantic, self-indulgent or dramatic. Hawthorne has earned her stripes as a non-fiction writer and a crafter of short stories, but this little book should thrust her into the public eye for novel readers and story tellers alike.

And little, in the conventional sense, it isn’t: weighing in, as it does, at over 200 pages, but the text is so mercilessly edited to essentials that it reads without digression, giving you plot lines that are tight and real without ever feeling contrived.

Divided into two – the corollaries, if you will – the book has you enthralled, from the get-go. What do you do with teen girls dangerously ready for life in a world beset with the joys and terrors of being alive in 2010? What do you do when driving alone on a semi-rural road, you suddenly find yourself caught by your safety belt on the brink of your own blood pressure due so something that happened on the road that you have no memory of? The thread of humanity is cast in the hands of a South African police detective, and the result is dynamite.

Flipped, on an abstract level makes you think of the philosophy about one butterfly flapping his wings on one side of the world and unleashing a hurricane on the other. And yet, the twist in this book is human, all too human. Read it, even if you never read books at all.

• Flipped is written by Tracey Hawthorne is published by Modjadji Books, Cape Town (2023).