Sally-Ann Murray’s Debut Novel: Small Moving Parts

“We fall under the spell of Halley Murphy’s imaginings, losing ourselves in Murray’s lush, vivid prose.”
– Anne Landsman
Wherever she began, numbers were stories. A man was 1. Which meant In the Beginning. It meant The One and Only. And One of a Kind…
A woman was 3. Curved. Curvaceous. But in Halley’s family, their mother became The One. The one raised finger and the only firm footing.
In between were the children, 2. Halley, and Jen. Daddy was gone, so he was 0.
Kwela is pleased to announce the publication of Sally-Ann Murray’s Small Moving Parts, a powerful and imaginative narrative that swirls and eddies around a Durban family and their neighbours living in a block of flats close to the busy docks.
Halley is a smart girl growing up poor in Durban, close to the bustling docks. Trying to make ends meet is her mother, Nora, who pares herself to the bone to provide. Halley’s sister is bored of everything, but she’s not a regular girl anyway, she’s a princess.
Halley finds a way to live that’s more than making do. She finds that a little love and imagination can take you pretty far, and that they certainly help to hold the curious bits and pieces together. It’s an unusual package, but what more, she wonders, could anyone want from life, or from a long, lovely story?
Small Moving Parts is a tale of bad choices, hard work, happiness and happenstance.
About the author
Sally-Ann Murray is a practising poet, an indigenous gardener, a lover of junk, coastal cities and other restless identities, and a mother of two young children.
She is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she presently lectures in literature and journalism, literary tourism, postmodernisms, and creative writing.
She won the Sanlam Award for her first poetry collection, Shifting (1992), as well as the Arthur Nortje/Vita Award. She also makes more tactile forms of “collected poems”, toying with words as three dimensional art. As an invited performer at Poetry Africa in 2006, she presented the installation “Circumstanzas”, an assemblage of ‘odd-boxes’ which plays with the relationships between poetry as found object and crafted artifact. She is also the author of a second collection of poetry, open season.