Search results for ""Author Karen Jennings""

The focal point of the novel is the small town of Soutbek. Its troubles, hardships and corruption, but also its kindness, strong community and friendships, are introduced to us in a series of stories about intriguingly interlinked relationships. Contemporary Soutbek is still a divided town - the upper town destitute, and the lower town rich, largely ignorant - and through a series of vivid scenes, the troubled relationship between Pieter Fortuin, the town's first coloured mayor, and his wife Anna is revealed. In so many ways the past casts a long shadow over the present, not in the least through the unreliable diaries of Pieter Meerman promoted by Pieter Fortuin and Professor Pearson, a retired white historian. They give us a unique insight into the lives of the seventeenth-century Dutch explorers, and hint at a utopian society, suggesting that Soutbek is the birthplace of assimilation and integration. The blossoming friendship between Anna, Sara, a foundling, and Willem, Pieter Fortuin's nephew, is unsettled by David, Anna's and Pieter's son. His father has bought David a bright future, but when he comes back from boarding school David appears alienated from his father and from his old friend, the former gardener Charles Geduld, just as Anna starts to accept him as her son. Is there hope, or are we left with Willem's conclusion that 'he would spend the rest of his life working off the debt of his family's poverty'? A moving story that paints a thought-provoking picture of life in contemporary South Africa.

Read more less

Travels with My Father is a beautifully written autobiographical novel. Written from the point of view of a young woman, daughter and writer, it is a frank, yet delicate and moving, account of her relationship with her father and his influence on her own life.In the footsteps of her father, the author travels the world. Yet, key scenes are set in Plumstead, a suburb of Cape Town, where her father lived most of his life.The relationships and divisions between members of a family that does not wear its heart on its sleeve, and some of whom are real eccentrics, are sensitively recorded. It all adds to an intricate picture of a changing South African society.

Read more less

Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home...

Read more less

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE 'An Island concerns itself with lives lived on the margins, through the story of a man who has exiled himself from the known world only to find himself called to the service of others, themselves exiled from the world by cruelty and circumstance. It is on these grounds that this writer deftly constructs a moving, transfixing novel of loss, political upheaval, history, identity, all rendered in majestic and extraordinary prose.' Booker Prize Judges panel. "A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story." Elleke Boehmer Samuel has lived alone for a long time; one morning he finds the sea has brought someone to offer companionship and to threaten his solitude... A young refugee washes up unconscious on the beach of a small island inhabited by no one but Samuel, an old lighthouse keeper. Unsettled, Samuel is soon swept up in memories of his former life on the mainland: a life that saw his country suffer under colonisers, then fight for independence, only to fall under the rule of a cruel dictator; and he recalls his own part in its history. In this new man's presence he begins to consider, as he did in his youth, what is meant by land and to whom it should belong. To what lengths will a person go in order to ensure that what is theirs will not be taken from them? A novel about guilt and fear, friendship and rejection; about the meaning of home.

Read more less

In the title story Away From the Dead we meet Isaac Witbooi, a farm worker, who has to come to grips with losing everything including the graves of his entire deceased family. In After Spring a couple takes a holiday but we're drawn into the issue of identity: Even if they hadn't heard us speaking English earlier, they would have known our foreignness simply by sight. It is visible to them in our facial features, the way we wear our clothes, our hair. The fact that we are third and fifth generation South Africans respectively matters little to them. Making Challah is a touching picture of an ageing woman, and it uses the baking of challah as a wonderful metaphor of passing time. Ridwaan and Chadley are On the Train, a seemingly routine journey but somehow a dog has been acquired and it's been Chadley's first time to kill. Find out how it felt to be Andries Tatane who, on 13 April 2012, died during a service delivery protest in Ficksburg, South Africa. In the Narrative of Emily Louw, a true story, a young woman regrets not having given something to old Emily after listening to her sad story: At the second, a policeman had looked at the blanketed child, her worn face and bleeding feet and he had smirked, as though to indicate that her husband had left by choice and couldn't be blamed for his departure. Next is a thoughtful reflection on being called Muzungu when a white South African woman visits Uganda. From Dark is a rallying call to remember that illegal mining causes the deaths of hundreds every year. Zama-zamas (Zulu for 'chancers') live underground for months at a time, dying in police raids, fires, cave-ins and poor conditions. A young couple's outing goes horribly wrong in At the Seaside. Grandmother's great big wicker picnic basket, which was supposed to be a treat, takes the blame. An 'informal settlement' of zinc shacks on the flatlands sets the scene in Allotment. Warda Meintjes and her husband struggle to survive. A great stadium for the World Cup is being built but Warda's unborn child stops moving. The homeless were being rounded up by police, placed in trucks, driven out into the countryside and dumped. 'Thank God we're spared that,' one woman said. 'Don't fool yourself,' another replied. 'That is us. It has already happened to us.' In The Shark Mia's very sense of being gets overtaken by events. A dark story leading on to Development, darker still, but thought-provoking, and about what it is to be human. The Wall is almost surreal and deals with growing old on the street. Alletjie lives with her husband Jan Bakker and Solly, her disabled brother, next to an old mine built by Cornish miners in the 1880s. Their circumstances are a cut above those of Warda and her husband, yet, 'living on the old goats and chickens and a disability grant was never enough', and Alletjie who 'does everything' thinks it isn't fair, 'the mine owned her this future for herself'. Resurrecting again exerts a certain surreal appeal. A father takes to his bed because of a crushed pigeon or is it a metaphor for a crushed soul in the office? His son is told to pray but is there going to be a resurrection?

Read more less