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The Way Of The Women
On sale
4th December 2008
Price: £16.99
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 2008
How can you speak when speech has been taken away? When the only person listening refuses to understand? Milla, trapped in silence by a deadly paralysing illness, confined to her bed, struggles to make herself heard by her maidservant and now nurse, Agaat. Contrary, controlling, proud, secretly affectionate, the two women, servant and mistress, are more than matched.
Life for white farmers like Milla in the South Africa of the 1950s was full of promise – newly married, her future held the thrilling challenges of creating her own farm and perhaps one day raising children. Forty years later, the world Milla knew is as if seen in a mirror, and all she has left are memories and diaries. As death draws near, she looks back on good intentions and soured dreams, on a brutal marriage and a longed-for only son scarred by his parents’ battles, and on a lifetime’s tug-of-war with Agaat. As Milla’s old white world recedes, in the new South Africa her guardian’s is ever more filled with the prospect of freedom. Marlene Van Niekerk’s is a stunning new literary voice from South Africa, to compare to J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.
Life for white farmers like Milla in the South Africa of the 1950s was full of promise – newly married, her future held the thrilling challenges of creating her own farm and perhaps one day raising children. Forty years later, the world Milla knew is as if seen in a mirror, and all she has left are memories and diaries. As death draws near, she looks back on good intentions and soured dreams, on a brutal marriage and a longed-for only son scarred by his parents’ battles, and on a lifetime’s tug-of-war with Agaat. As Milla’s old white world recedes, in the new South Africa her guardian’s is ever more filled with the prospect of freedom. Marlene Van Niekerk’s is a stunning new literary voice from South Africa, to compare to J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer.
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Reviews
** 'Fascinating and moving, this is, above all, a love story
** 'Ambitious and loaded with a narrative energy you will not find - at the same pitch or in the same range - in the work of any of the big names in South African writing ... A masterpiece has arrived
** 'THE WAY OF THE WOMEN combines the stark intensity of a remarkable death-bed chamber piece, which none the less contains humour, with a compendious sweep from 19th-century boomtime in the Cape to the Angolan war
** 'These are huge subjects ... Without a doubt a novel of ideas but also a very musical one, an 'act of writing