Noria struggles to keep babies and for her children to grow old – this becomes a symbol of the inability of the damaged nation to grow without healing. As the novel goes on, Noria and Toloki cultivate a life together. They watch American sitcoms in their home theatre. He plasters the walls with these images for Noria when the house is done, the lovers take a tour of their “dream home.” In a play of imagination and magic, Noria and Toloki rest on king-sized feather beds and admire their professional kitchen. Inside the house, Toloki finds images of beautiful kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, and more, from houses in America and Europe. Toloki collages the house with magazine photos and paint, turning it into a bright and Technicolor world for them to share. Noria's house, however, is unlike the others around it. Inspired by this assistance, Toloki comments on it to Noria, who explains that life in this village is a communal effort toward survival. All the neighbors gather to help them build a mud floor, and many offer furniture and other bits and pieces to help Noria get her life back together. Toloki decides they will build a house together he begins the work, gathering rusty steel for the frame. Just before Vultha's funeral, Noria's shack burned to the ground, leaving her homeless. Toloki and Noria quickly fall in love with each other, and Toloki sets about filling Noria's life with more happiness than grief. When Toloki spots her and pays his respects for her lost child, Noria reveals that this is the second child she has had to bury in her young life. Noria is grieving the loss of her son, Vultha. She and Toloki were not friends, however, Noria has grown into a beautiful young mother in the decades since Toloki has seen her. In their younger days, Noria was a wild child. At one of these funerals, Toloki reconnects with Noria, an old childhood acquaintance. As a mourner, Toloki wanders the South African countryside, looking for work at what seems like an endless number of black funerals. He is a professional mourner, working in small black communities and shantytowns like the one where he was raised. Toloki, who has faced an extreme amount of hardship throughout the decades of Apartheid and in the years afterward, has found a way to channel his grief into a professional career, one that pays his bills if he lives frugally. The book symbolizes the pain and struggle of post-Apartheid South Africa, speaking to the complexity of life during this period when intra-Black violence was not reported for fear of retaliation from white police and leaders looking for any excuse to reinstate old systems of power. The book is a love story, following Toloki, a professional mourner, and his new girlfriend Noria, whom he meets at her son, Vutha's funeral. Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda is a work of magical realism set in an unnamed town five years after the first elections post-Apartheid in South Africa.

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