Andre Brink
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English
Description
As startling and powerful as when first published more than two decades ago, André Brink's classic novel, A Dry White Season, is an unflinching and unforgettable look at racial intolerance, the human condition, and the heavy price of morality. Ben Du Toit is a white schoolteacher in suburban Johannesburg in a dark time of intolerance and state-sanctioned apartheid. A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African...
Author
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English
Description
On a farm near the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century, a slave rebellion kills three and leaves eleven others condemned to death. The rebellion's leader, Galant, was raised alongside the boys who would become his masters. His first victim, Nicholas van der Merwe, might have been his brother. As the many layers of Andre Brink's novel unfold, it becomes clear that the violent uprising is as much a culmination of family tensions as it is an...
Author
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English
Description
The year is 1749, when the Boers ruled South Africa. And so it has come to his Baas's final command to his Hottentot slave Adam, to flog his mother, because she refuses to prune the master's vineyard in order to attend her own beloved mother's funeral. And when he refuses to do so, and his Baas smashes his face with a piece of wood, Adam turns on him, and beats him almost to death. Then he flees to South Africa's veld. There he comes to the rescue...
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English
Description
He is the chieftain leader of the Khoikhoi, a nomadic people derogatorily called 'Hottentot'' by European colonists. She is a white woman left behind by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama's crew when they rounded Africa's southern tip in 1498. Their romance is the core of this powerful novella. According to Portuguese myth, Zeus turned Adamastor into the rocky cape of the South African peninsula. André Brink's parable suggests that white Europeans...
Author
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English
Description
Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer who has lost his gift for the word. That is, until, he meets Rachel, a woman destined to become the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled. Before I Forget is the final act of Chris's creative life; it is the coming together of all the chaotic pieces of his existence. It is much more than the story of how he met Rachel; it is the story of his life and his lifetime of loves....
6) Other Lives
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English
Description
In just one morning, he forgot who he was... Three provocative and interconnected stories from one of the world's greatest living writers: A white painter in Africa comes to his studio in the afternoon. On his doorstep, he sees a woman with curly hair and a dark complexion. He has never seen her before, but she embraces him. As he steps past her, two strange children rush to his feet yelling "Daddy!" This family welcomes him home, but he knows none...
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English
Description
Martin Mynhardt seems invincible. Violence surrounds him, yet he remains unscathed: a woman asks him the time, then leaps in front of a train; after a mine riot, he watches hoses sweep scattered body parts off the floor. Just before the shocking violence that brings South African apartheid to an end, Martin decides to return to the family farm for a weekend. A highly successful businessman and Afrikaans Nationalist, he hopes to sell the property to...
8) Philida
Author
Language
English
Description
This is what it is to be a slave: that everything is decided for you from out there. You just got to listen and do as they tell you. You don't say no. You don't ask questions. You just do what they tell you. But far at the back of your head you think: Soon there must come a day when I can say for myself: This and that I shall do, this and that I shall not.Andre Brink-"one of South Africa's greatest novelists" (the Telegraph)-gives us his most powerful...
