Crooked Seeds
16 April 2024Synopsis
'Extraordinary ... unputdownable' Roddy Doyle
'An unsparing yet profoundly beautiful novel' Chigozie Obioma
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.
Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer.
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?
Deidre 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 ageing 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 face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country.
In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.
Details
16 April 2024
9789361135743Reviews
‘Darkly humorous . . . Crooked Seeds is not a “book that feels like a warm hug” but more what Kafka called “an axe for the frozen sea within us”’ – John Self, Guardian
‘(A) compelling, meditative novel’ – New York Times
‘Jennings has summoned a rotting wraith of South Africa’s discarded apartheid culture. . . . This is a novel that dares to push us beyond disgust, beyond pity, to a point where we’re forced to touch the swollen tumor of another person’s deepest humiliation. The real artistry of Crooked Seeds lies in Jennings’s ability to make this story feel so propulsive.Could any person’s suffering expiate the sins of South Africa? These are questions this urgent novel forces upon us. Crooked Seeds leaves us reeling’ – Washington Post
‘Karen Jennings’s Crooked Seeds has a moral and psychological precision that sharpens its examination of apartheid’s legacy, and effects a bleak study, unsparing but compassionate, of a character broken by trauma’ – Sydney Morning Herald
‘(An) outstandingly good novel . . . Reminiscent of other South African writers: Gordimer, Galgut, Coetzee . . . (Jennings) has many qualities of her own, not least a very dark humour that surfaces with perfect timing. . . . This is not a “feel-good” book, but it did make me feel good – feel joy, in fact – at its precise pursuit of its vision, at its grown-up complexity and at the way Deidre is such a perfectly realised fictional creation’ – Observer (UK)
‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost unbearable, yet so good, so clear, it is unputdownable’ – Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize–winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
‘Karen Jennings is a modern master of the castaway novel . . . Crooked Seed’s Deidre and Trudy are unforgettable characters living on the margins of life. Together, they make this an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel’ – Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities
‘Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed, and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. This is a quietly devastating novel’ – Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
‘The past comes back to haunt a woman whose life is deteriorating in this powerful new novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author (Karen) Jennings . . . With evocative prose and an apocalyptic setting, Jennings brings these complicated women to life while the world around them slowly crumbles. Readers will be captivated by this compelling novel about the corrosive power of family secrets.’ – Booklist
‘Bleak and provocative . . . leaves readers with much to ponder about South Africa’s painful history . . . There are no easy answers in Jennings’s knotty narrative.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘A riveting read’ – Frontline
‘A moving and engrossing work which takes the reader in its grip and does not let go till the last word has been read’ – Scroll.in
‘Crooked Seeds successfully explores how shades of the past are reflected into the future. The hope and the scope of resolution is inevitable’ – Youth ki Awaaz
