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RECESSIONAL FOR GRACE
Fiction (Literary Fiction) 302 pages
Penguin (SA) - August 1, 2004
Longlisted for the IMPAC Literary Award 2005
'There is a saying in Zulu, 'if you were in my flesh, I would tear you out, but you are in my blood, which cannot be divided.''
So begins this heartbreaking novel of thwarted love, and the loss of a people’s way of a life, set in the haunting landscape of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. The narrator, a present day PhD student of linguistics, chances upon the research of the late Clement Godfrey into indigenous cattle, more than a half century before. She becomes entranced by the beautiful and evocative praise poetry used by Xhosa people to name their cattle and finds herself increasingly drawn to the man behind the words, to the places he walked in, and to the shadow of the woman who took his photo, the war widow and schoolteacher, Grace.
Biography
An acclaimed children's fiction writer whose first adult novel TRAIN TO DORINGBULT was shortlisted for the CNA Literary Award, 1987. IRON LOVE, was published in South Africa in 1999. Author of an academic work on the Xhosa praise names for cattle THE ABUNDANT HERDS (Fernwood, 2003), which won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Dept Arts and Culture. She lives in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
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