Mother Jones: The Heart of Redness.

By Zakes Mda. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $24.

The Heart of Redness, by South African novelist Zakes Mda, is a deceptively simple book. Beneath its folksy, almost fairy-tale tone is a nuanced story about belief, memory, and the complex legacies of colonialism and its contemporary heir, global capitalism. Most of the novel takes place in a single village, Qolorha-by-Sea, which big-city developers are eyeing as the site for a vast casino resort. The villagers' support for the plan is split along an ancient schism between the Believers and the Unbelievers-divided for more than a century by their allegiance or nonallegiance to a teen prophetess who promised that "if the people killed all their cattle and set all their granaries alight, the spirits would rise from the dead and drive all the white people into the sea." Back then, the Believers prevailed--and the people starved. Ironically, it's now the Unbelievers who make a leap of faith, buying into the developers' promises of deliverance.

Mda leaps ably back and forth between Qolorha's current occupants and the ancestors who still hold sway over their lives. He paints a vivid picture of a new South Africa of uncertain future, in which white tourists pay to experience authentic village life while tribal chiefs name their children after cellular phones, where the past is deeply contested terrain and social equality remains a faraway dream.