First of December

First of December is set in the momentous week leading up to midnight on 1 December 1838, the day that South Africa’s slaves were finally emancipated.

Karen Jennings’ compelling novel tells this story of history in the making. It follows the lives of three characters battling their own personal circumstances.

There is the slave, the mother of a still-born baby, who decides to run away to Cape Town to find her lover. There is Caroline, the convalescent English bride, who loathes both her husband James and this ramshackle outpost to which he has brought her. And there is James himself, desperate to make his fortune in the colony after he has run through Caroline’s dowry.

First of December is about the unexpected twists and turns of history. Its drama is born from the strivings of its characters to find a better life amid every kind of turmoil. From the moment the bells strike midnight, setting the slaves free, the world they inhabit will be irreversibly changed.

Karen Jennings is a South African writer whose novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, with the follow-up longlisted for The Women’s Prize in 2025. She currently lectures at North-West University. She received the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award in 2021, and has won the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

Karen founded The Island Prize for unpublished African authors to help them get published globally. Now in its fifth year the prize has helped authors from all over the continent.

This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’ Roddy Doyle on Crooked Seeds

'Absolutely brilliant and proof again…that fiction can tell us more about our human condition than most journalism can…an amazing book with an incredible story at the heart of it.’ Michael Brissenden, ABC RN: The Book Shelf on Crooked Seeds

‘Thoroughly absorbing… a small but powerful book, with the reach of a more capacious work, compounding merciless political critique and allegory rendered in tender prose.’ Guardian on An Island