Cape Fever
A Novel
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“It’s a stunner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner.
I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.
The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.
While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes—a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.
Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in a fictional British colony in 1920, this striking psychological thriller from Davids (An Imperfect Blessing) finds a housemaid questioning her employer's motives. It dismays Soraya Matas to learn that her new job cooking and cleaning for widowed British settler Alice Hattingh is live-in; Soraya had hoped to continue residing in the Muslim Quarter, where she could freely practice her religion. Soraya's family needs the money, however, so she makes peace with only seeing her loved ones once a fortnight, and befriends the benevolent ghost of her predecessor. Incorrectly believing Soraya to be illiterate, Mrs. Hattingh offers to write and receive her correspondence with her fiancé, aspiring teacher Nour. Postage is expensive, so Soraya accepts, but when Mrs. Hattingh prevents Soraya from examining what she writes and receives in return, Soraya starts to fear the woman is taking liberties with the correspondence. Her misgivings multiply when Mrs. Hattingh thrice postpones Soraya's next visit home. Taut plotting, electric prose, and Soraya's paranoid first-person narration set this slim, atmospheric novel apart. Gothic touches combine with elements of magical realism and real-life historical horrors to forge a chilling fable that's at once familiar and singular. It's a stunner.
