Ruben Olivier leads an isolated existence in a Cape Town suburb. His wife has died, one of his sons has settled in Australia, and the other wants to emigrate to Canada. The only constants in Ruben's life are the old family home, the ghost of a seventeenth-century slave girl who haunts it, and Magrieta, the elderly housekeeper who comes in to look after him. When Ruben's neighbor and best friend is brutally murdered by marauding gangs, the subtle yet pervasive threat of violence hovering over life in Cape Town becomes frighteningly real. All agree that taking in a boarder might be a good idea, and Ruben is pleasantly surprised when young Tessa Butler walks in out of the rain one Saturday night. She restores passion and intrigue to his life, but he has little time to enjoy the infatuation, for soon Ruben finds himself in a web of deceptions, manipulations, disappearances, and lies. This extraordinary novel is at once a rich story of enigmatic characters and a boldly disquieting meditation on the attempt to build a future of hope and promise from the legacy of the past.
Author
André Philippus Brink was a South African novelist. He wrote in Afrikaans and English and was until his retirement a Professor of English Literature at the University of Cape Town. In the 1960s, he and Breyten Breytenbach were key figures in the Afrikaans literary movement known as Die Sestigers ("The Sixty-ers"). These writers sought to use Afrikaans as a language to speak against the apartheid government, and also to bring into Afrikaans literature the influence of contemporary English and French trends. His novel Kennis van die aand (1973) was the first Afrikaans book to be banned by the South African government. Brink's early novels were often concerned with the apartheid policy. His final works engaged new issues raised by life in postapartheid South Africa.
