Unusually the story has a third person plural narrator, a collective 'we', the people of the city and the village who have individually witnessed events but are recounting them from a communal perspective (I think this is a nod towards collective oral traditions of narrative and also omniscient ancestors). The protagonist is a professional mourner who meets a woman from his home village at the funeral of her son in the city about twenty years after he last saw her.

This is a novel set in an unnamed city on the coast of South Africa, presumably based on Cape Town, in 1993-4, shortly before the transition to inclusive democracy. Ways of Dying was awarded South Africa's prestigious M-Net Book Prize, awarded by the TV channel M-Net to books written in one of South Africa's official languages, and was shortlisted for the Central News Agency (CNA) Award and the Noma Award, an Africa-wide prize founded by Shoichi Noma, onetime president of Kodansha International. Together they help each other to heal the past, and as their story interweaves with those of their acquaintances this elegant short novel provides a magical and painful picture of South Africa today. At a Christmas day funeral for a young boy Toloki is reunited with Noria, a woman from his village.

Day after day he attends funerals in the townships, dressed with dignity in a threadbare suit, cape, and battered top hat, to comfort the grieving families of the victims of the city's crime, racial hatred, and crippling poverty.

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