Claire Robertson
Katrijn van der Caab, freed slave and wigmakerâ€™s apprentice, travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang, a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services. The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love.,Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away, Sister Vergilius, a nun at a mission hospital, wants to free herself from an austere order. It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer â€“ an Englishman and suspected Communist â€“ who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born, desire is unfurling slowly.,In Claire Robertsonâ€™s majestic debut novel, two stories echo across centuries to expose that which binds us and sets us free.,About the author:,Claire Robertson lives in Simonâ€™s Town. She has spent the past 30 years as a journalist, reporting from South Africa, the US and USSR. She has worked in newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and now works as a senior copy editor on the Sunday Times. She has won awards for her reporting and her work is carried in several anthologies.
Fiction,Cultural,Africa
The Spiral House