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| Note: The first two novels on this page are now out of print, but can be found in second-hand bookshops. The link at the end of each blurb will take you to an online bookseller who will be happy to source a copy for you. |
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| Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary (Michael Joseph, London, 1989; Grafton, 1990) was inspired by a South African hit squad raid on Maseru, Lesotho, during which a number of people were murdered. It deals with the tragic effects of apartheid violence and hatred on young South Africans, and is also a double love story spanning thirty years. Thoughts was a finalist for the 1989 CNA Literary Award, and was later published in both hardback and paperback by Econ Verlag in Germany under the title Tief im Süden. |  From
the blurb: “The date is December 1985; the place a village in
the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, the independent black country surrounded
by white South Africa. Hooded gunmen have come in the night and shot
dead a young couple: Rose, a South African teacher, and her coloured husband
Jake, a poet turned ANC activist with whom she had been living in exile.
Her mother grieves over the torn bodies while her father rages round the
village in a fury of loss. In a series of flashbacks, Rose’s life and her
parents’ stormy marriage unfold against the background of the turmoil and
agony of recent events in South Africa, dominated by the urgent need to
identify with those set apart for their colour. But, as the local
people prepare for the funeral, a ray of hope shines through the darkness.
The white girl and her husband did not die in vain. There was a survivor
of the shooting… A pulsating first novel from South Africa,
Thoughts
in a Makeshift Mortuary is the tragic account of a forbidden love between
two people of different races and a lament for the young lives being laid
waste in an unhappy country. Above all, it is a praise song to the
South Africans of all races who are trying to build bridges rather than
blow them up.”
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| The Sweet-Smelling Jasmine (Michael Joseph, London, 1993; Penguin, London, 1994) moves between the early 50’s and the present. It centres on an unhappy wife whose new lover encourages her to delve back into the dramatic events of a year in their shared past in a racially mixed town on Natal’s South Coast, when community unrest culminated in rioting and the destruction of a Hindu temple. Jasmine was submitted by South African librarians for the Irish Impac Award, and later published in both hardback and paperback by Econ Verlag in Germany under the title Zeit des Jasmin. |  From
the blurb: "The Sweet-Smelling Jasmine is a rich and multi-layered
novel, set in present-day and 1950s South Africa. It opens with Isabel
in the arms of her unnamed lover, a man from the brief exciting year in
her youth when she discovered a whole new world in the Natal sugar-mill
town of Two Rivers. A world which became a powder keg of racial tension
and religious fervour, and finally blew up when a Hindu temple stood in
the way of progress. What happened to the gutsy, inquisitive young
Isabel, who is now an unconfident woman straining against the shackles
of a moribund marriage and much-loved but demanding grown-up children?
Who were Finn and Stella, Mr Reddy and Opal, Kesaval and Asha, and the
frenzied Sister Kathleen? And which of the four boys from Two Rivers
has she met again and fallen in love with?
At her lover’s urging, Isabel resolves to untangle the threads of her life – and perhaps gain enough self-respect to free herself from her carping husband – by writing about the events she experienced as a teenager and about the people she shared them with. As she remembers the series of incidents that led up to the fatal explosion of violence on a Good Friday evening, Isabel comes to terms with a part of herself that for years has been repressed, and in doing so, she finds the key that will change her life.” |
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| The Telling of Angus Quain (Jonathan Ball, Johannesburg, 1997) is the account of an unusual friendship between a Johannesburg business tycoon and a woman historian, set largely in the men’s club where he lives. When he is diagnosed as having terminal cancer, he begins to tell her about his less-than-savoury past and her life takes a very different turn. Quain was shortlisted for the 1998 M-Net Book Prize and was also chosen for submission for the Irish Impac Award, and will be published during 1999 by Econ Verlag in Germany. |  From
the back blurb: “The Telling of Angus Quain is a sharply observed
novel of contemporary
Johannesburg, featuring Angus Quain’s rise from railwayman’s son to executive glory and his unusual friendship with Faith Dobermann, a lonely writer/historian who begins to realise that he is not who he seems… In the corporate world where power equals money, ‘King’ Quain reigns supreme until he is sabotaged by cancer and his carefully constructed secret lives begin to unravel. Faith’s curiosity about him grows into a quest for the truth that takes her from a Jeppe striptease joint along the devious byways of financial corruption to a startling confrontation between the dying man and his rivals in fraud, witnessed by the people he has spent a paradoxical lifetime helping. This is the compelling story of a brilliant but flawed man and his last, redeeming relationship with an independent younger woman: a story of our time, cast with people whose voices are all too familiar and set against the minefield of modern city living.” |
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