When an unusual building appeared overnight in a remote northern Cape community in the 1970s, and disappeared a few weeks later, it seemed to point to a series of baffling existential overlaps.

Some individuals claimed that occasionally they found themselves on the other side of a restive civil war divide, in identity embodiments that were highly contrary versions of themselves. In other cases, absurd social situations seemed to mock 'normal reality' by alternating with it. When a small-town journalist reported on the events, his quiet life became cruelly disrupted by unwanted attention.

Were these accounts imagined or real? Real enough to the eyewitnesses. Traumatised and adrift, the journalist later wrote up his story in reportage style when a childhood friend invited him to recuperate on her farm. He believed he had narrowly escaped the disappearance of an entire region - a place nobody has ever heard of - and its people, including the love of his life.

As the mystery unfolds, with an aura of retrieved memory, the narrator's lost love becomes an increasingly evocative presence. The Equality of Shadows is a compelling novel - in some places uproariously funny, in others filled with deep pathos - about the vagaries of identity, love and time.