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The Spiral House

ISBN 
9781415207529
Format 
Trade Paperback
Recommended Price 
R290.00
Published 
September 2014
About the book: 

Katrijn van der Caab, freed slave and wigmaker’s apprentice, travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang, a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services. 

The year is 1794, it is the age of enlightenment, and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love. Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away, Sister Vergilius, a nun at a mission hospital, wants to free herself from an austere order. 

It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer – an Englishman and suspected Communist – who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born, desire is unfurling slowly.

In Claire Robertson’s majestic debut novel, two stories echo across centuries to expose that which binds us and sets us free.

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About the Author

Claire Robertson is the author of The Spiral House, winner of the 2014 Sunday Times Fiction Prize and a South African Literary Award, and shortlisted for the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize, and The Magistrate of Gower, shortlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and Under Glass,  shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times  Fiction Prize. She lives in Simon’s Town.

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