Crooked Seeds

Description

By (author) Jennings Karen

Short /annotation:

Deidre is a victim, of herfamily, her society, her history. That is how she seesherself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Untilthe police take her back to her family home…

:

Deidre is a victim, of herfamily, her society, her history. That is how she seesherself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Untilthe police take her back to her family home…

In a Cape Town where wateris rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequencesof apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to dayin squalor -largely created by herself- borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyoneshe knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectfulconstable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in ashattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she hasto accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents” goldenboy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it trulyis to be a victim.

Biographical note:
Karen Jennings is a South African writer whose novel An Island waslonglisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. She is currently writer-in-residenceas a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa”s Past,Stellenbosch University. She was given the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award in2021, and has won the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short StoryCompetition. Her first novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the EtisalatPrize. Travels with my Father, a memoir, has been a set university text inSouth Africa, and been successful in India and the UK.

Karen co-founded The Island Prize for unpublished Africanauthors to help them get published globally. Now in its third year the prizehas helped authors from all over the continent, with both winners beingpublished in the UK.

Promotional headline:

“No, this isnot a ”feelgood” book, but it did make me feel good – feel joy, in fact, at itsprecise pursuit of its vision, at its grownup complexity and at the way Deidreis such a perfectly realised fictional creation … Outstanding.“
John Self, The Guardian

“”Crooked Seeds” is hard to read and impossible to look awayfrom”
Ron Charles, The WashingtonPost

“Deidre”s the kind of character who gets under your skin:furious, flawed and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people withunflinching honesty and deep compassion. A quietly devastating novel.”
JanCarson, author of The Raptures

“…an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel.”
ChigozieObioma, f The Fishermen, and An Orchestra of Minorities

”This is anextraordinary novel.It is shattering, almost unbearable, yet – so good,so clear – it is unputdownable.”
Roddy Doyle