Kikuyu, by Etienne van Heerden

"As one cannot talk about Israel without having read Amos Oz, or India without Salman Rushdie, or South America without Márquez or Llosa, so you'll have to read Van Heerden if you wish to understand South Africa." Herman de Coninck, NRC Handelsblad, Rotterdam

Fabian Latsky remembers his childhood on the holiday farm Soebatsfontein in the Karoo - at times through the eyes of a young boy, more often with the world-weary perspective of the writer he has become. The series of events of the summer of 1960 changed his outlook on life irrevocably.

His mother, who yearns for the old days in the theatre, lives for the new Season when the rondavels set on the kikuyu lawns are bursting at their seams with visitors. It will provide an escape from her husband's LSD-induced hallucinations and a drab existence where her only solace is a secret liaison with Major Heathcote MacKenzie.

Amongst the holiday guests who arrive this year are Tant Geert, butch and worldly-wise, and her new lover, Miss Marge. Following developments with an eagle eye, Fabian becomes aware of the Thing - the workers call it Kikuyu - which prowls about in the dark, biding its time. Is it the Thing which violently snatches away the beautiful Shona girl Tsitsi? Or is it Reuben the black steward who drifts through the guests, secretly listening; the Broederbond-uncle who brought Tsitsi along as a helper; the Pastor who's come to the Moordenaarskaroo to recruit souls? Or is it perhaps the scrawny Major with his medals and the silver bullet he's saving for the Thing?

Kikuyu is a fascinating evocation of a Karoo childhood through which the"winds of change" are blowing, and it confirms Etienne van Heerden as a writer of international repute. Kikuyu has already been published in Afrikaans by Tafelberg and in Dutch by Meulenhoff.