OKAY, OKAY, OKAY

350pp., paperback, Cape Town, 2019

A novel about a woman who agrees to stage-manage a university event and becomes embroiled in two vastly different worlds - "beleaguered, bureaucratised university and effervescent, show-must-go-on musical theatre." from the back cover

"Alive with wit and intelligence and beautifully written, this novel will keep people talking and arguing for a long time," Michiel Heyns, author of I Am Pandarus and Sportful Malice: a comedy of revenge

"How much do I love this author - let me count the ways. Like Jane Austen, she has a moral vision wrapped in humour. Like Middlemarch, she holds up a mirror to a provincial world that cuts down what it can't see. And like Olive Schreiner, the novelist recalled at the centre of Okay, Okay, Okay, she has the courage to speak truth to power." Lyndall Gordon, author of Outsiders, five women writers who changed the world

Finuala Dowling, first collection of poems, I Flying, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. Her second, Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe, was a co-winner of the Sanlam Prize, and her third, Notes from the Dementia Ward, won the Olive Schreiner Prize. Her previous novels include Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, winner of the 2012 M-Net Literary Award for English Fiction, and The Fetch, which won the Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Dowling is currently Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies at University of Cape Town.