Eventually, helped by the ghost of a disabled uncle and his performing cockroaches, the two women consummate their relationship in a Jacuzzi while Colonel Narcissist sets their father’s empty mansion on fire around them.

Héloïse, on the other hand, claims that her body should be used by anybody to whom it can give pleasure, and falls heavily for Sosthène, a boy working alternately as the manager of a street performer and as the companion of a dissipated but vaguely literary Frenchman. Parisette develops a hatred for men after being impregnated by the demon Chat’yan and undergoing an elaborate abortion ritual in the ocean, but has a terrifying run-in with the sadistic Colonel Narcissist in the pensions’ office. Much of the novel focuses on the sexual experiences of the half-sisters. To a constant background of music – zouk, madiaba, smurf, makupa, and above all mezoff – Héloïse and Parisette, the so-called “Blanco” and “Blacko”, begin with clearly separate points of view delineated in alternating chapters, but slowly begin to merge into one another. But he’s mysteriously absent from home, and instead she finds herself greeted by Parisette, who is making herself over in the guise of a war widow named Dame Dragonfly to attempt to claim her pension before the real widow can get to the office. Héloïse is the daughter of a Frenchwoman who has come to TiBrava to meet her father. Set in a lightly fictionalised version of contemporary Togo, Cola Cola Jazz is the story of two dizzyingly beautiful half-sisters meeting for the first time as adults and becoming enchanted by each other.

Cola Cola Jazz by Kangni Alem