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Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa. 

Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades. 

“I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a country moves forward from such an atrocious history. What can we do to heal a nation?” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But I was left asking myself: Is this enough? Do people feel satisfied by truth alone?” 

And in fact, that’s the question at the center of Francis-Sharma’s taut new thriller, “

.” Shifting between South Africa in the late 1990s and Washington, D.C., in 2018, the novel tells the story of Prudence Wright who is forced to confront a violent past she has tried to ignore. But violence begats violence, and trauma begats trauma. How can one truly atone? 

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Novelist Lauren Francis-Sharma witnessed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings as a young law intern. Now she’s written a thriller about what she saw. 

This author witnessed South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Years later, she wrote about it

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