The Cape Flats, to many people, are dusty settlements spotted out of the windows of airplanes when landing in Cape Town, known mostly through news reports as places of poverty, violence and gangsterism, and home to the many coloured people of the city. Coloured is a term that's hard to explain. It's a racial classification created by the apartheid state in 1950, a social experiment that lumped together people of varying class, heritage and religious background in an identity to which they did not choose to belong.Veteran journalist Rehana Rossouw's debut novel gives a voice to the Flats and their inhabitants and presents a story of one family's struggle to keep themselves together in a harsh environment during a time when a variety of social forces threaten to pull them apart.The place is Hanover Park, the year is 1986 and law office messenger Neville Fourie and his factory seamstress wife Magda are trying hard to keep their three children Suzette, Nicky and Anthony on the path to making what they can with their lives as coloured teenagers in apartheid South Africa. Using a narrative framework that allows us to experience this world through the eyes of each of the characters, Rossouw pulls off the difficult task of telling a story that is both universal and specific, gently funny without making fun of its characters, political without being didactic, and humane without being sentimental.Her characters speak in English that is inflected with the rhythms and grammatical peculiarity of the Flats and the Afrikaans slang that peppers their thoughts and speech seems natural rather than forced. Written in a prose that's simple but effective, the story moves briskly towards an ending that shows Rossouw as a realist rather than an idealist.Within the world of the Flats in a period of increasing tension in South Africa, the Fourie children are forced to gradually leave behind the dull, reassuringly compulsively neat claustrophobia of their home life as they move into the world and have to deal with politics, gangsterism, race and class in an uneven society. In Hanover Park, "interrogation" means possible arrest. In the City Bowl, it's a word that a group of white friends at a dinner party toss around to tell a friend to stop being so inquisitive.Rossouw is not nostalgic about life on the Flats, but she is attuned to the nuances of the social relationships that communities developed in these areas after being dumped there under apartheid, and how groups like gangs, churches and neighbourhood watches rose to importance in a world where official structures could not be counted on.Inevitably Neville and Magda's struggle to keep their children away from the comrades, gangsters and the unobtainable temptations of white middle-class life in the city is a futile one in an era that we now know was the beginning of the end of the regime.Having served as a judge for both the Sunday Times Fiction Prize and the European Literary Award, Rossouw honed her craft in the Wits Creative Writing MA programme and produced a novel that is powerful, entertaining and true.'What Will People Say?', Jacana, R195..