“As I lifted my eyes, they landed on some deep chocolate eyes with long eyelashes right across me. Our eyes locked for a few seconds longer than normal. That was awkward, I thought and looked away.” – Pumza Shabangu With the massive success of the fifty shades trilogy, there’s been a renewed interest in literary erotica. Of course, as The Cheeky Natives, we were particularly interested in literary erotica we could relate to outside of the vanilla world mentioned earlier. This is where Pumza Shabangu’s novel ‘Unspoken truths’ is a welcomed breath of fresh air. This novel is centered around the lives of picture-perfect couple, Thando and Bongani, whose lives are changed by events no one could’ve foreseen. There is a narrative of love lost and gained but of far greater interest is the love lives of these characters. The sex scenes in this book are what some of your favourite erotica writers wish they could do. In this book, we can see that Black characters live multidimensional lives, with interesting and often complex love lives. In this novel, Pumza covers a variety of relationships, both heterosexual and queer with the depth and respect they require. She allows the reader to question some deeply held beliefs about love, sexuality and culture and the intersection of all this. Pumza explores relatively uncharted waters in black South African literary erotica and in writing this book. At one of our possibly most fun events, packed to the rafters with lovers of the book and erotica, Pumza Shabangu sat down to go into depth about the themes of love, culture, relationships and of course sex. Twitter: @cheekynatives :@Pumza_Shabangu