Kate is a burnt-out editor at the busy Centaur Press publishing house. Over forty and lonely, she is driven to searching for love on the Internet. There she encounters not a few daunting challenges - chief among them the realisation of impassable gulfs between the mindsets of the men who cross her inbox and her own personal non-negotiables.
When a small Nguni dog enters her life Kate is forced to acknowledge some painful home truths, and in order to find the intimacy she longs for she first has to let go of her own destructive patterns.
Part wry romance, part social commentary, Survival Training for Lonely Hearts tracks the personal and political complexities that characterise present-day South Africa, a wounded society caught between the collateral damage of the old and the emerging vibrancy of the new. Along the way, Kate loses her heart, finds her mojo and, as in all good quest journeys, discovers that the map is not the territory.