Crooked Seeds
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the police. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her family’s former home, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with questions about her brother, and his dealings with a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s with terrorist leanings.
Deirdre doesn’t know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she deserved. But as alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains. Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel, in exquisitely spare prose, about the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.
Karen Jennings is a South African writer whose nove An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Cape Town and is a writer-in-residence at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, Stellenbosch University.
‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’ Roddy Doyle
‘Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. A quietly devastating novel.’ Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A white South African family's ties to 1990s pro-apartheid terrorism resurface in the bleak and provocative latest from Jennings (An Island). Deirdre, 53, lost her leg as a teen when her brother, who later died from a drug overdose, accidentally set off a bomb while preparing for a plot to discourage Black citizens from voting in the 1994 general election. She lives now in a senior living facility, her family's house having been repossessed by the government. Determined to be seen as a victim and a "cripple," she drinks heavily, cadges cigarettes from staffers, asks constant favors of the young Black mother across the hall, calls her adopted Black daughter in London seeking money, and ignores her own mother, who lives across the street. When the police approach her with recently found evidence of human remains buried on the grounds of their former home, she spirals deeper into despair and alienates everyone around her. The mystery of whose remains may have been found is only partially solved, and the novel's open-ended conclusion leaves readers with much to ponder about South Africa's painful history and the stories Deirdre has told herself to survive. There are no easy answers in Jennings's knotty narrative.
