In frontier country, travelling in a van containing a mysterious diva, a young woman must find her feet.
THE IMMORTALITES
by Claire Robertson
TBD
(via The Lennon-Ritchie Agency)
By the winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Ellen Kent has been called several things in her short life: orphan, governess, harlot. None is accurate, but here she is, a problem to be solved by her party of English settlers on an African shore in the year 1834. She is placed in the care of a retired cavalryman, and together they become the custodians of a van, a white horse and a silent, abundant woman – a grubby goddess and a thorough mystery. They travel through the war-struck frontier lands; Ellen is protector and handmaiden as the questions grow in her: how to find accommodation with this uncanny place of enchantment and death. How to find a way to stay.
For 30 years, award-winning journalist Claire Robertson has reported from South Africa, the US and the USSR. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Her debut novel, The Spiral House, won South Africa’s most important literary award, the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, as well as a South African Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize. She is the author of three more novels: The Magistrate of Gower, Under Glass, both shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and ISLE. She lives in Sydney.
Fifteen year old Natalie has had a horror of blood and meat since the day her bother, Flynn now 17, raped her at age 9. Yet sheand her family (mother, Viv, former trophy wife, now hapless housewife; father, Ray, former accountant, now handyman; andgrandmother, Eleanor) are trapped on an enormous factory farm in a world where climate change has left plant cropsdevastatingly rare, and the Corporation ensures meat is virtually all there is to eat. With grains grown exclusively for raisingcattle, pigs and chicken for slaughter, and greens a black-market luxury, Natalie is emaciated, bitter and angry. She is desperateto escape, but electric fences and the draconian punishments of the Corporation stand in her way.
A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author ElizabethTenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intriguedby what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But thingsbecome even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written ahundred years before their time. Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novelMIRAGE. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. Asone mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, aself-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, itbecomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to thevillage before?