Trevor Noah, host of the award- winning "The Daily Show", has come up with a funny and honest collection of stories that detail the popular comedian's coming of age in South Africa as apartheid ended.
"Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood" is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist.
It is also the story of that young man's relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother- his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
Noah's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of "The Daily Show" began with a criminal act: his birth.
He was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison.
Living proof of his parents' indiscretion, Noah was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away.
Finally liberated by the end of South Africas white rule, Noah and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by centuries-long struggle.
The stories in the collection, published in India by Hachette, are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting.
Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Noah illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty.
His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humour and a mother's unconventional, unconditional love.
Noah regularly had to acclimate to a variety of fraught situations, forcing him to think critically about race and the country's legacy of racism and colonialism.
Throughout these experiences, he remained anchored by his mother, Patricia, whose aspirations for her son guaranteed that he would be able to rise above his meagre beginnings.
Noah says he and his mother had a very 'Tom and Jerry relationship'.
"She was the strict disciplinarian; I was naughty. She would send me out to buy groceries, and I wouldn't come right home because I'd be using the change from the milk and bread to play arcade games at the supermarket," he writes.
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