The Goat Herder by Stewart Ronen; Author Interview & Book Review

Nathi is a young Zulu man, who leaves his poor South African village.He is the herder of the goats in the village. One day he finds a old photograph of a pretty, white girl around his house.
Nathi leaves his rural village, and with the help of his best friend Jacob he gets a job at the house of rich Jewish people, Naomi and Zechariah. Eliav Nathi’s new job is to be their gardener.Naomi and Zechariah have two daughter, Ora and Ruth. Ruth is not happy with her life: her mother has matched her to a doctor, but when she meets him she doesn’t like him that much. When Nathi and Ruth meet, Nathi immediately thinks that Ruth looks very similar like the girl on the old photograph he found. He believes this is a sign from the ancestors and that a childhood dream, interpreted by the village sangoma, is coming true. They fall in love, but they have to keep it very secret.They both have to cope with their religious and cultural differences, their environment is new to mixed relationships. When Ruth leaves for Israel, Nathi travels to Israel to go after his love..


The Goat Herder is just a fabulous book between cultures! It was very different than the books I usually read, but that was just what I liked about it. I liked how the different Nathi and Ruth came together and how that happened. Stewart does a great job keeping your attention throughout the entire novel, I can't wait to read more of his stories.The book takes you to villages and cities in South Africa, Israel and even a tiny fragment is set in Hong Kong,so if you love traveling to other countries this is your book. Read this one people! You won't regret it!

Author Interview with Stewart Ronen:

What inspired you to write The Goat Herder and what influences and experiences did you bring into the book?
I was raised in a family where we always had domestic workers who lived in our house. We had a gardener, someone who ironed our clothes, so there where always a lot of people around us. I always had this idea that came back: what if one of the domestic workers would get a romantic relationship with a member of the family, like one of the parents or the children? We are all people with emotions, and in retrospect I don’t think it is strange when this would happen. But I never heard that it happened, never heard stories about it and I was wondering why . Didn’t tough about it for a long time, I started to write poetry and songs, and I started to think about it again.When I moved to The Netherlands in 1992 I wanted to write, this idea came back and I thought it might be a good idea for a book. Mostly domestic workers are women, but I thought it might be a good idea to make it a love story between a Zulu man and a Jewish Girl, and this is how the story was born.

Someone asked me if the book is autobiographic: it isn’t but as many writers I was inspired by things that happened in my life that makes the fiction more realistic, like interaction with the domestic workers, Jewish life, that comes from my own life.The characters are fictional, but they do have characteristics that are inspired by real people.

How did the character of Nathi and Ruth originate?
In my mind I wanted to have a Zulu boy, a goat herder, as the protagonist in the story. With Nathi, I wanted to create a character who came from a primitive background, a poor family, was superstitious, believed in spirits and goes to the big city to find work and lands in a complete different world than his own. I wanted there to be a big contrast to Ruth: a Jewish girl from a wealthy family, there had to be a challenge between cultures, which was also inspired from reality. Ruth was created during the writing process, she is disillusioned by the men around her, doesn’t have enough spiritual fulfillment in her life, finds her life boring, and that makes her meeting with Nathi so special.


Could you tell us about your path to publication? Any sprints or stumbles along the way?When I finished the manuscript, I had it edited and readed by trusted readers, then I started to look for a literary agent. The story is South African, and the first thing that I did was to contact American literary agents. It was rejected by the American agents, but the feedback that I got from them had nothing to do with the story itself, more about economic reasons. Then I started to look for a South African agent, and I had high hopes that one would accept it. But the problem was that many already had their list ready for that year or didn’t want this genre, so it wasn’t easy. I read about authors who self-published their book, and that the quality is just perfect and professional, so I self-published it, the other side of it is that I had it self-published from America, that was before I knew that I would move from the Netherlands to South Africa, and that the delivery aspects of it are somewhat more difficult with self-publising. But both with real publishers and self publishing you have to do a lot of marketing yourself.

What would say has been the most rewarding aspect of writing The Goat Herder? This novel took me two and a half years to write, and during the writing of it, from the start to the end, I noticed that my writing improved and that I was getting better in it, that was really a reward, to see how my prose was developing. Sometimes I had a writers block but by talking to people and fellow writers, by reading lots of books and through meditation I learned how I could let the writers block disappear. Every author wants his book to be read, that is also a reward. I love getting feedback from readers to hear what they thought of the book, I welcome all kinds of feedback.

 What are your favourite authors, and which authors have inspired you the most?The last few years I was very impressed by Khaled Hosseini, Hisham Matar and the South African author (and nobel prize winner) Nadine Gordimer. I also like more classic authors like Ernest Hemingway,Alan Paton and Paolo Coelho

Can we expect more books by you in the future? I am working on my second novel now, which will be finished later this year. The theme of it is espionage. It is set in the Middle East, mostly in Egypt. It is written in the first person, which is a Palestinian boy. It’s a very different project then this and I expect a lot of it. My plan is to not self publish it but to find a literary agent. The story is not bound to South Africa this time, so more possibilities.