Margot is a late-night talk radio host – the perfect job for an outspoken insomniac. Her Kalk Bay home is crowded with wonderfully evocative characters such as her teenage daughter, Pia, her hopelessly romantic yet mostly absent lover Curtis, and the family hanger-on, Mr Morland, a professional psychic. Finally there’s her mother, Zoe, once the acclaimed author of a quirky self-help volume with the same title, but now increasingly senile. In this deeply moving new novel by the award-winning poet...
Notes from the Dementia Ward is Finuala Dowling’s third collection of verse following on the brilliant and popular I Flying and Doo-Wop Girls of the Universe. This new collection deals in part with the tragic-comic effects of the inexorable and distressing collapse into senility and the way in which memory and yearning come to the fore as a mix of poignancy and wit. The balance between the grim and the touchingly comic is delicately maintained and the subject is imbued with dignity and grace....
Poet John Carson lives in a crumbling seaside house with his sister and niece. He writes feverishly to the woman who has abandoned him as a lover, yet kept him as a correspondent. Theresa: beautiful, generous . . . and married. The occasional fleeting encounter between the lovers fuels John the writer, but leaves John the man close to despair. To keep his feelings in check, John loses himself in the details of his home life – the never-ending chores of domesticity, his niece’s mysterious eating...
The coastal settlement of Slangkop, near Cape Town, comes alive over weekends when mercurial Chas Fawkes holds court at Midden House. Invited to one of his legendary parties, shy, plump librarian Nina Browne is smitten and becomes first his secretary, then his lover. But things are not as they seem on the glittering surface, as Nina in turn is loved and watched over by Chas’s childhood playmate, the hermit-like environmentalist William. When Chas’s estranged alcoholic wife Dolly briefly returns,...
