Philida

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012. 
 
An unforgettable story of a woman determined to find her freedom - set in South Africa in 1830s, as slavery was about to be abolished.

In the hands of Mr Brink, one of South Africa’s most famous novelists, the land breathes, it feels alive

A moving story of one woman’s struggle against hierarchies of race and gender that seek her absolute subjugation, Philida vividly dramatises the courage required to lay claim to the protections of the law, to speak out for ones rights even in the moment in which the law is on the wrong side of history

Brink tells this grand-guignol tale in harrowing style

A poignant tale of a slave woman's quest for liberation set in 19th century Cape Town

Mixing brutal historical fact with legend, the novel paints a fine picture of a disintegrating society

Philida is a unique, illuminating and original book…utterly engaging

Brink writes beautiful prose, peppered with evocative descriptions of historic and often tragic Cape life

Brink writes beautiful prose peppered with evocative descriptions of historic and often tragic Cape life

Brink's act of literary ventriloquism in Philida - his summoning of the voice of an illiterate slave-girl from the 1830s, in all its demotic sophistication and expressiveness - is undeniably astounding

An unforgettable story of one woman’s determination to survive and be free

The light and shade that Brink has skillfully introduced into his augmented family history make for a compelling and memorable novel

Andre Brink (1935 - 2015) was one of South Africa's most prominent writers and is the author of several novels, including A Dry White Season, Imaginings of Sand, The Rights of Desire, The Other Side of Silence and Philida. He has won South Africa's most important literay prize, the CNA Award, three times and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His last novel, Philida, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012.

The year is 1832 and the Cape is rife with rumours about the liberation of slaves. Philida is the mother of four children by Francois Brink, the son of her master. 
 
Francois has reneged on his promise to set her free and his father has ordered him to marry a white woman from a prominent family, selling Philida on to owners in the harsh country in the north. Unwilling to accept this fate, Philida tests the limits of her freedom by setting off on a journey. She travels across the great wilderness to the far north of Cape Town - determined to survive and be free. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2012.

The Blue Door

This novel is a delicately beautiful exploration of the confusion in human relations: what lies, unrealised, behind the door of an individual's conception of self.

Ultimately, Brink seems to suggest that acceptance of change, at least for white South Africans is the only way to live.

There's more than a nod to Kafka in ...The Blue Door - a tussle with surrealism and philosophy.

The Blue Door is built around one of the oldest questions in storytelling: What if ...? What if I return home one day to find, behind a familiar door, an unfamiliar world? What if the people closest to me turn out to be strangers? What if strangers start claiming a place in my life I cannot imagine? What if the memories of the most important moments in my life can no longer be trusted? What if I am not who I think I am? 
David le Roux, a teacher recently turned fulltime artist, returns to his studio one afternoon to find his whole familiar world turned upside down. The woman who opens the door and welcomes him as her husband is a complete stranger to him: beautiful and loving, but not the wife he assumes he has been married to for nine years. The children are overjoyed at his return, but he has never set eyes on them before. And when he goes back to the building he believes he lives in, it no longer exists. Has everything in his life been illusion? Or is the past real and only the present a hallucination? In a country like South Africa these questions may decide a whole life. 
Instead of living with the consequences of early choices he now discovers that behind every choice made lurks the possibility of innumerable other choices not made. 
What if, indeed ...?

Instant In The Wind

In early 1749 a white woman and a black man are stranded in the wilderness of the South African interior. She is an educated woman, totally helpless in the wilds. He is a runaway slave. They know only each other. At first their relationship is guarded, poisoned by the black and white in them both. But hesitantly there emerges between them a fellowship that engulfs their most private selves, as they face the long trek back to civilisation.

A Fork in the Road

The memoir of one of South Africa's best-loved novelists.

A passionate and remarkably brave exhumation of loves, hates and friendships

Those who have never before opened one of Brink's books and wish to find him at his considerable best should at once read the first sixty pages of his autobiography

Brink's a brave man, oh yes, and this is an extraordinary book because it combines, uniquely, angry forensic polemic with writing of the highest order

Romanticism, often in the teeth of appalling oppression and tragedy, is the spirit which runs through A Fork in the Road

A fascinating exploration of the white South African psyche

It is almost impossible to read the last page of this impassioned, self-critical, open memoir and not be moved to tears

This is André Brink's story of a life lived in tumultuous times. He describes with searing honesty his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence and storytelling was a means of reconciling the stark contrasts of his world. 
 
His time spent in Paris in the 1960s confirmed in him the desire to become a writer but his opposition to the apartheid establishment resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police; it also led to extraordinary friendships with leaders of the ANC in exile. 
 
A Fork in the Road is André Brink's love song to the country where he was born and where, despite recent tragedies, he still lives today.

Praying Mantis

A magical novel from a world class writer about a remarkable historical figure.

From the stones of his country's rich, tragic, tumultuous history, Brink has built a novel that should nourish his reputation for years to come

Brink's lyrical but spare writing evokes the harshness of the veld and the dream world created by the Bushmen. A book that lingers in the mind long after you have reached the last page

A work of fidelity and imaginative freedom

In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of a woman, the soap-boiler Anna, and the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is then made the first Khoi or 'Hottentot' missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. 
 
Received into the fold of the Church, Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs and is appointed as missionary in a remote and arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people.

Before I Forget

A remarkable novel from a world-class writer about love in all its forms.

Before I Forget is a novel by a writer at the peak of his craft

A sober and beautiful - one might even say indispensable - meditation on the nature of love

Brink is one of the crucial writers of our time

Garcia Márquez, Solzhenitsyn: André Brink must be considered with that class of writer

Before I Forget is not a book that will be forgotten easily

Chris Minaar is a distinguished South African writer, an old writer, but a writer who has lost whatever gift he had for writing. It is on New Year's Eve, courtesy of his stalled car, that he meets Rachel, a young sculptress who becomes the great love of his life, a love greater for being unfulfilled. 
 
He finds himself captivated by Rachel and drawn into a close friendship with her husband. As their friendship develops, Chris must reconcile himself to an unaccustomed type of intimacy but one that inevitably threatens this precarious triangular relationship. 
 
Woven through this is the story of his life and of a lifetime's loving. For he has known many women. As it becomes clear that this book is the final writing act of Chris's creative life, so we understand that these recollections are an attempt to bring order to an otherwise chaotic existence. 
 
Before I Forget is the history of a life set against the history of a nation, and the history of a transforming love.

André Brink

Ruben Oliver's life is coming adrift from its moorings. He has been obliged to take early retirement from his job as a librarian due to 'rationalisation' and the new political realities of South Africa. His wife has died. One of his sons has settled in Australia, the other is about to emigrate to Canada while trying to persuade Ruben that it is too dangerous to remain. 
 
The only constants are his old family home, haunted by the ghost of a young slave woman; and his housekeeper, Magrieta, with whom he has a shared history that goes back more than half his life. 
 
When Tessa Butler comes out of the rain one night in response to an advertisement for a lodger, Ruben is captivated by her. She restores passion to his life, but brings with her a turbulent past.

André Brink

The Rights Of Desire

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