From a bold new voice in literary fiction comes a compelling story of three mothers whose lives intersect during a generation-defining period in South Africa’s history.
A CONSPIRACY OF MOTHERS
by Colleen van Niekerk
Little A, October 2021
The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own. Ingrid’s very existence is proof of a white man’s crime, and that man’s mother will do anything—even kill—to ensure the truth remains buried.
An evocative debut which takes place a few months prior to Nelson Mandela’s presidency and release from prison, A CONSPIRACY OF MOTHERS tells a gripping story of love and betrayal from multiple perspectives while deftly balancing the painful legacy of apartheid with the trials of motherhood.
Colleen van Niekerk was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, and now lives in Vancouver, Canada. This is her debut novel.
A fearless Burmese warlord, Olive Yang dressed, smoked, fought, and loved like one of the boys, rebelling against the confines of her gender from a very young age and later carrying on eyebrow-raising love affairs with a movie starlet, a General’s wife, and her own prison warden, amongst others. Beloved and revered by her soldiers, this trailblazing woman reigned over a powerful army that controlled the Golden Triangle from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, and infamously assisted the CIA in their plan to arm militias against Communist Chinese troops. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, this female firebrand has largely been forgotten, relegated solely to the footnotes of history books. Until a few years ago, no one even seemed to know whether Olive was alive or dead. Determined to right this wrong, Gabrielle Paluch set out on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to find Olive Yang. What she found is, as they say, stranger than fiction.
World-renowned geologist and paleontologist Gerta Keller is at the center of what has been called the nastiest feud in science, a contentious debate popularly known as “The Dinosaur Wars” over what triggered the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs have enthralled us for generations, and the question of what caused their demise is more relevant than ever, as humankind confronts the paroxysms of an imperiled planet and the possibility that we may become the dinosaurs of the sixth extinction.
To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, and endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?
None of these people care about Piper. All they’re really doing is forcing me to replay everything I did—everything I didn’t do—to push my sister to her breaking point. Piper Sullivan never should have been at Suicide Point the day she fell. Her older sister, Savannah, knows this with all her heart—just as she knows that Piper’s “accident” was entirely her fault. Savannah did something awful, something she can barely stand to think about, and now Piper is in a coma. But just as Savannah’s guilt threatens to swallow her whole, she finds something strange in Piper’s locker: a note inviting Piper to a meeting of their school’s wilderness club…at the very place and on the very day she fell. Which means that there’s a chance Piper wasn’t alone. Maybe it isn’t Savannah’s fault, after all. Someone in the club might know what really happened. Someone might have done something. But why? If Savannah wants to find out the truth about that tragic day, she’ll have to join the club on their weekend long camping trip…on the very same mountain where her sister fell. And with everyone in the club a suspect, she’ll need to be careful or she might follow her sister into the dark.