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Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. He has been obliged to take early retirement from his job as a librarian due to 'rationalisation' and the new political realities of South Africa. His wife has died. One of his sons has settled in Australia, the other is about to emigrate to Canada while trying to persuade Ruben that it is too dangerous to remain. The only constants are his old family home, haunted by the ghost of a young slave woman; and his housekeeper, Magrieta, with whom he has a shared history that goes back more than half his life. When Tessa Butler comes out of the rain one night in response to an advertisement for a lodger, Ruben is captivated by her. She restores passion to his life, but brings with her a turbulent past.
Helping to research her lover's film on the great plague, Andrea returns to Provence. However, her journey becomes more a trip of personal discovery than one of pure academic research as she begins to enjoy more and more of the idyllic lifestyle. Travelling with Mandla, a fellow South African and Black activist, helps Andrea put into perspective the more hedonistic elements of her new life. However, through the intensity of his own convictions Mandla forces his friend to re-assess her own beliefs, casting a shadow on the relationship. As the story unfolds in a landscape evoked with a breathtaking mastery, Andrea and Mandla confront the uneasy relationships which develop between themselves and their lovers. Their difficulties form an allegory for those faced by two disparate continents, as they undertake the process of reconciling Europe's past and Africa's present.
A young German woman joins other women being transported to Germany's colony in South-West Africa, but when she is confronted by the harsh reality of life in Africa, she joins a ragtag army of women and native victims to take on the German Reich.
"Andre Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty, he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts of his world - between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn't bargained for." "While living in Paris in the sixties his disc...
THE BOOK: A narrative counterpoint between two women, two South Africas. Kristien Muller returns from London to her homeland to fulfil a promise. Her grandmother lies on her deathbed unleashing a turmult of myth, legend and brute fact. Confronted by the realities of a land hurtling towards change, Kristien discovers that the present holds its own moments of savagery. A searing panorama of South Africa's experience, reminiscent in its political & imaginative scope of Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude.
The First Life of Adamastor has it origins in an act of rescue: what, wondered André Brink, lay behind fragments of myth that have been handed down about the mountains of the Cape? Adamastor, the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocks of the Peninsula, first appears in European literature in the sixteenth century - much about the time of the first known contact between seagoing European explorers and the natives of Southern Africa. How, Brink asks, would that meeting have looked from the landward side? What role would the visitors take in the mythology of an utterly different culture, with its own deities, its own accumulated story? Brink, in this extraordinary, moving and potentially explosive creation has unearthed from the sun-carved land itself the missing meanings of a myth that has waited five centuries to be invented.
The Love Song of André P Brink is the first biography of this major South African novelist who, during his lifetime, was published in over 30 languages and ranked with the likes of Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Carey and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Leon de Kock's eagerly awaited account of Brink's life is richly informed by a previously unavailable literary treasure: the dissident Afrikaner's hoard of journal-writing, a veritable chronicle that was 54 years in the making. In this massive new biographical source – running to a million words – Brink does not spare himself, or anyone else for that matter, as he narrates the ups and downs of his five marriages and his compulsive affairs with ...
Ranging in tone from dispassionate historical overview to bare-knuckles polemic, these essays chronicle South Africa's willful transformation from repressive police state to emerging democracy.
Hanna sees her chance to escape years of abuse in the orphanage by joining a shipload of young women to the colony of German South-West Africa to assuage the needs of the male settlers. This journey reveals suffering, revenge, companionship and love.