Anneleigh Jacobsen recently chatted to fellow author Pamela Power about her debut fictional corporate thriller and her real-life experience of working as a brand manager in Sandton that inspired it all.

Corporation Games asks:

What happens when the spirit world of South Africa clashes with corporate greed?

Why have the tokoloshes been sent to sniff out evil in Sandton?

How come the shades begin to move behind the automated sliding doors in the silent coolness of marble where money talks louder than people?

• Read more about Corporation Games

Jacobsen didn’t just send Power a copy of her book, but also a tin of pilchards and a half-jack of whiskey. Why? And where does her fascination with tokoloshes come from?

Read the hilarious interview to find out:

Q: Along with Joburg, Tokoloshes are also main characters in the book. Why the fascination?

A: I love this question because it always makes me smile – I genuinely feel that the tokoloshes and the spirit world they exist in arrived on my page when they needed to, rather than me making that decision. From a story point of view, I was needing a way to close the loop back from the rural consumers to the Sandton boardroom. It really bugged me that those consumers felt powerless in the face of the giant companies, and I wanted to give the story a way for them to fight back on their own terms, outside of the government and legal structures that the book touches on too. And somehow in that pondering the spirit world presented itself and the tokoloshes were suddenly at the edges of the boardroom, much to my delight.

• Keep reading: Go.See.Do Gauteng

Read more:

• Read an excerpt from Corporation Games by Anneleigh Jacobsen – a thriller based on real-life financial scandals
• [Watch] Anneleigh Jacobsen explains how her new thriller Corporation Games came about

Categories Fiction South Africa

Tags Anneleigh Jacobsen Corporation Games Go.See.Do Gauteng Interviews LAPA LAPA Publishers Pamela Power