Crooked Seeds

Name: Crooked Seeds
SKU: 88318
Availability: InStock

₦10,000.00

A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family’s troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt—from the Booker Prize-longlisted author of An Island

Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a year-long drought, queues form before water trucks, and the nearby mountains threaten to burn.

In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with questions: Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?

Deirdre doesn’t know the answers to the detectives’ questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she deserved: overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbours while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. 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 for her and her country.

6 in stock

About the Author

Karen Jennings is a South African author. Her debut novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the inaugural Etisalat Prize for African Fiction. Her memoir, Travels with my Father, was published in 2016, and in 2018 she released her debut poetry collection, Space Inhabited by Echoes. Currently living in Brazil, last year Karen completed post-doctoral research at the Federal University of Goiás on the historical relationship between science and literature, with a focus on eusocial insects. Karen works with the mentorship programmes run by Writivism and Short Story Day Africa, both of which promote writing in Africa. Her interests lie in colonialism, historically and in the lasting impact that it has had on the continent of Africa and beyond. She is particularly concerned with the quiet lives of the everyday people who have been mostly forgotten by the politicians, big businesses and the rest of the world. In this way, she strives to give the ordinary a voice that can be heard and appreciated. Karen was a Miles Morland Foundation Scholar while writing this book.