Rachel Zadok (33) sold almost 50 000 copies of her first novel in the UK. Within days of being published it was one of Amazon’s 500 top sellers. The South African author's book, Gem Squash Tokoloshe, has received rave reviews from The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, amongst others. A second print run was recently done to meet demand. Rachel has gone from being a waitress and working at a charity shop, to doing radio and TV interviews and appearing at bookshops and literary festivals.
Rachel was born in Johannesburg, where she attended Jeppe Girls’ High and lived close to Robert's Avenue in Kensington. After completing a fine arts diploma, she worked as a graphic designer for 7 years but ended up hating it. Her regular e-mails to friends overseas were looked foreward to and they told her to consider writing. In 2000, she and fiance, Julian te Riele, a doctor, moved to London in order to further his career. Rachel took a creative writing course. While waitressing part-time, she enrolled in the Certificate in Novel Writing, run as an evening course by the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning at City University. By the time the course ended, half of Gem Squash Tokoloshe was finished.
While taking a break from writing late one afternoon in September 2004, she switched on the TV and watched the Richard and Judy Show, London's answer to Oprah. Rachel never watched afternoon TV but that day, a new competition was announced. Like Oprah, Richard and Judy have a very popular book club which sends the sales of featured books soaring. The How To Get Published competition involved entrants submitting a synopsis and first chapter of a novel. Rachel decided to enter.
Several months later, while helping out at a friend’s charity shop, Rachel received a phone call from the show's producers. There were 46 000 entries and she’d made the final 26. Shortly afterwards she was told she was in the final 5. Rachel was eventually runner-up and Pan Macmillan, the publishing sponsor, was so impressed that they offered Rachel and the other runners-up a publishing contract with an advance of £20,000 each. Christine Aziz (46), a freelance journalist and homeopath, took first prize with her debut novel, The Olive Readers.
Gem Squash Tokoloshe is the story of the dissolution of a marriage as seen through the eyes of an innocent child. The inspiration for Gem Squash Tokoloshe came from a photo Rachel kept on her fridge door in her south London flat. It was of a friend and her child, Rachel's goddaughter. She called them Bella and Faith, and soon a story developed. Faith, the central character and narrator, is 7 years old when the story opens in 1985. Her Afrikaner father is a travelling salesman, returning only at weekends, and her mother, Bella, is into fairies and sprites, is left to look after their farm in the Northern Transvaal. Faith's dog, Boesman, is her only friend. One day Faith's father stops coming home and Bella’s health declines with the abusive relationship and loneliness driving her into madness. When Nomsa, the servant who looks after Faith, is shot, Bella is locked away. Fifteen years after Bella has died incarcerated in the Sterkfontein asylum for the criminally insane, Faith, not having spoken to her mother for 10 years, is on the brink of a breakdown of her own in the New South Africa. She has also inherited the farm.
Rachel, a fan of JM Coetzee and André Brink, took 3 years to pursue a career as a writer. She is now working on her second novel, also set in South Africa, dealing with HIV, rape, child abuse. She and her husband plan to return soon to South Africa.
