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.

The Other Side Of Silence

'Peter Carey, Garcia Marquez, Solzhenitsyn: André Brink must be considered with that class of writer' Guardian

Peter Carey, Garcia Marquez, Solzhenitsyn: Andre Brink must be considered with that class of writer

An astonishing performance... His most profound and most beautiful novel-It could well be Brink's most artistically complex and complete achievement

Compelling to read and hauntingly vivid... Suffering, humiliation, love, revenge companionship: to each Brink gives a multi-faceted, diamantine brilliance... Cries out to be read

Brink is one of the crucial writers of our time... A truly horrifying tale, but compassionately and compellingly told

As a small child in a wintry Bremen, Hanna dreams about the other side of silence, the place where the wind comes from and palm trees wave in the sun. Seeing her chance to escape from years of abuse in an orphanage and in service, Hanna joins one of the shiploads of young women transported in the early years of the twentieth century to the colony of German South-West Africa to assuage the needs of the male settlers. Following atrocious punishment for daring to resist the advances of an army officer, she arrives in a phantasmagoric refuge in the African desert - 'prison, nunnery, brothel, shithouse, Frauenstein'. When the drunken excesses of a visiting army detachment threaten her only companion, Hanna revolts. 
 
Mounting a ragtag army of female and native victims of colonial brutality, she sets out on an epic march through the desert to take on the might of the German Reich. This apocalyptic journey through the darker regions of the soul will also reveal to her the hidden meanings of suffering, revenge, companionship, love and compassion.

The Wall Of The Plague

'Brutally honest... A very good book' - Time Out

A courageous self-assessment... interesting and pivotal... done with sincerity and intelligence

Peter Carey, Garcia Marquez, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Andre Brink must be considered with that class of writer

One of South Africa's most eloquent literary voices

One of South Africa's most distinguished writers and a key figure in the modernisation of the Afrikaans novel

Helping to research her lover's film on the great plague, Andrea returns to Provence. However, her journey becomes more a trip of personal discovery than one of pure academic research as she begins to enjoy more and more of the idyllic lifestyle. 
 
Travelling with Mandla, a fellow South African and Black activist, helps Andrea put into perspective the more hedonistic elements of her new life. However, through the intensity of his own convictions Mandla forces his friend to re-assess her own beliefs, casting a shadow on the relationship. 
 
As the story unfolds in a landscape evoked with a breathtaking mastery, Andrea and Mandla confront the uneasy relationships which develop between themselves and their lovers. Their difficulties form an allegory for those faced by two disparate continents, as they undertake the process of reconciling Europe's past and Africa's present.

The First Life of Adamastor

'Terrifically well-written... André Brink is confidently at home with his myth. The details are fresh, convincing and bawdy' - Observer

A wonderfully entertaining work of fiction

A simple love story... A joyful psalm sung through the collective unconscious that unites all people... fun, fresh and firmly recommended... He is a writer of inspired violence and his shifts of viewpoint are thrilling and significant, and deeply honouring to the profession of literature

[Enjoy] the pleasure of Brink's playful wit and his colonist's skill in surveying an unknown mental landscape

The First Life of Adamastor has it origins in an act of rescue: what, wondered André Brink, lay behind fragments of myth that have been handed down about the mountains of the Cape? Adamastor, the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocks of the Peninsula, first appears in European literature in the sixteenth century - much about the time of the first known contact between seagoing European explorers and the natives of Southern Africa. How, Brink asks, would that meeting have looked from the landward side? What role would the visitors take in the mythology of an utterly different culture, with its own deities, its own accumulated story? 
 
Brink, in this extraordinary, moving and potentially explosive creation has unearthed from the sun-carved land itself the missing meanings of a myth that has waited five centuries to be invented.

Devil's Valley

'This is the work of a master story-teller' - Sunday Telegraph

All the compulsion of a thriller... Once again the South African novelist returns to his great theme of a journey into the interior, physical and spiritual, which enables him to examine man's existence in a largely hostile universe

Freshly, vividly and differently imagined as anything in his work to date

A moving, angry, exuberant journey into some of mankind's darkest dreams and the redemptive power of his most resilient hope

Flip Lochner is a weary and disillusioned newspaper crime reporter. Curious to find out more about the origins of a casual acquaintance, he descends into Devil's Valley where, like Dante's Virgil, he encounters a bewildering array of mysterious characters and events that lead him to reevaluate the world in which he lives and which he thought he knew. Fusing invention and reality, magic realism and earthy humour, Lochner's adventures in the valley centre around the journey he undertakes to discover the truth about the elusive and erotic figure of Emma, one of Brink's most remarkable creations.

Imaginings Of Sand

A wonderful, extravagant book; a melting pot in which women’s stories, black and white, young and old, marvelous fantasy and harsh political fact meet to create South Africa’s answer to Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

His first post-apartheid novel... A complex cocktail of myths, legends, magic, farce, politics and morals... Powerful and enchanting.

Wonderful... About discord and reconciliation: between new and old, black and white, dreams and reality

THE BOOK: A narrative counterpoint between two women, two South Africas. Kristien Muller returns from London to her homeland to fulfil a promise. Her grandmother lies on her deathbed unleashing a turmult of myth, legend and brute fact. Confronted by the realities of a land hurtling towards change, Kristien discovers that the present holds its own moments of savagery. A searing panorama of South Africa's experience, reminiscent in its political &amp; imaginative scope of Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

Chain Of Voices

' A triumph of storytelling' The Times

A triumph not only of storytelling but of insight into the belief that there are two sorts of people in the world: those born to oppress and those born to be slaves

It is 1825 and high in the mountains of South Africa a group of slavesstand accused of the murder of their owner, Nicolass van der Merwe, a wealthy Afrikaner farmer. Galant, the van der Merwe family's chief hand, is held leader of the murderous band. Raised with the two sonsof the house, it was not until adulthood and rivalry over Hester, orphaned daughter of a tenant farmer, that he realised their differentroles, their unequal futures and opposed stations in life. A CHAIN OFVOICES stands as a prophetic lesson - when hopes of freedom from slavery are dashed, and when promises of equal treatment are broken, an escalating spiral of bitterness, resentment, and finally, explosiveviolence is inevitable.

On the Contrary

'A timeless, intensely metaphorical novel, but it is also urgently topical' - Times Literary Supplement

An immensely generous novel, vivid and adroit in its use of history

Peter Carey, Garcia Marquez, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: André Brink must be considered with that class of writer

On the surface, On the Contrary is a picaresque historical novel... Underneath, of course, the novel is about today's South Africa and the dilemmas facing people challenging the status quo. Brink has written a novel which entertains first and only later assumes a political significance. To rake over the old embers with such skill and ingenuity represents a considerable acheivement

Estienne Barbier, born in the Loire Valley in 1699, lays claim to service in the armies of the kings of France and Prussia, but he is an inveterate liar, and the truth is less glorious: irate husbands have made the Lowlands too hot to hold him, and he has deserted his pregnant wife to stow away for the Cape of Good Hope. 
 
An expedition to the hinterland opens his eyes to the majesty of the African landscape and its wondrous animals and he is enchanted by the rumour of a fabled city of gold. But he also begins to see clearly the sordid dealing that underlies the self-righteous pomposity of the East India Company. It is a vision that makes him powerful enemies. Taking cover on a remote farm, and energetically consoling sundry widows, Barbier finds himself, to his own surprise, fomenting rebellion.

Rumours Of Rain

A potent novel about a life in crisis on the scorched plains of South Africa by the Booker shortlisted laureate of African fiction, André Brink.

Peter Carey, García Márquez, Solzhenitsyn: André Brink must be considered with that class of writer'

As complex and powerful as the African continent itself

Winter in South Africa - a time of searing drought, angry stirrings in Soweto, and the shadow of the Angolan conflict cast across the scorched bush. 
 
Martin Mynhardt, a wealthy Afrikaner, plans a weekend at his old family farm. But his visit coincides with a time of crisis in his personal life. In a few days, the security of a lifetime is destroyed and, with only the uncertain values of his past to guide him, Mynhardt is left to face the wreckage of his future.

An Act of Terror

'An Act of Terror belongs to that small group of novels embracing a country's ethos and history in one panoptic vision... Peter Carey... García Márquez... Alexander Solzhenitsyn, André Brink must be considered with that class of writer' - Guardian

A political thriller, set in South Africa, laced with all the angst and pain and lacerating emotion that comes from attempting to intellectualise, and hence come to terms with, living in that volatile, unnerving, but ultimately fascinating land

An Act of Terror is the work of a sane, civilised, intelligent man- a story about events that are in the process of becoming news stories. Brink... is a writer of inspired violence, and his shifts of viewpoint are thrilling and significant, and deepy honouring the profession of literature

This is clearly André Brink's tour de force

`A massive apartheid thriller centred on a plot to blow up none other than the State President outside the gates of Cape Town Castle. . . Brink at his robust and imaginative best' - Adam Low, Daily Telegraph. 
 
A profound novel set in South Africa that combines compelling action with an intellectual confrontation of the author's poitically volatile home country. A brave masterpiece from Booker Prize shortlisted, award-winning author André Brink.

Looking On Darkness

'A brave and important novel, and in any terms a fine one - linguistically exciting, continually perceptive about society gone mad, [and] fiercely angry about cruelty' - Times Literary Supplement

A novel of stature that explores our cancerous condition more persistently than any other novel has done before, and without the benefit of an anesthetic

Peter Carey, García Márquez, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: André Brink must be considered with that class of writer

A brutal, harrowing, desperately sincere piece of writing

Banned for many years in the author's native South Africa, Looking on Darkness tells the story of actor Joseph Malan as he awaits execution for the murder of his white lover. André Brink panders to no one's political, ideological or religious beliefs in a controversial novel which has achieved international significance and abundant critical acclaim. 
 
From three time winner of South Africa's most prestigious literary prize, the CNA Award.

Dry White Season

A man investigating the death of a friend discovers the dangers of curiosity...

Excellent...[a] harrowing and surprising story. The ultimate power of the book comes from an authoritative meditation on the traps that open up for someone who answers to himself before society

The revolt of the reasonable...far more deadly than any amount of shouting from the housetops

Books like this one succeed...in drawing our emotions into politics. What will remain is the plain bravery of his characters...their struggle has found an honest chronicler

Andre Brink's writing is built on conviction...A Dry White Season describes the triumph of tyranny

Ben du Toit is an ordinary, decent, harmless man, unremarkable in every way - until his sense of justice is outraged by the death of a man he has known. His friend died at the hands of the police. In the beginning it appears a straightforward matter, an unfortunate error that can be explained and put right. But as Ben investigates further he finds that his curiosity becomes labelled rebellion - and for a rebel there is no way back.

André Brink

The Rights of Desire is a book rooted in a place and a time where collective reality is taking a battering and where people are having to rely on themselves to make sense of what is coming into shape. Out of chaos always comes interesting art, and Brink is an excellent weather vane

A story that keeps one guessing until the end... An intelligent and gripping novel

Achingly beautiful and moving... This is a splendid novel by a master of the craft

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

Praise for The Rights Of Desire

The Rights of Desire is a book rooted in a place and a time where collective reality is taking a battering and where people are having to rely on themselves to make sense of what is coming into shape. Out of ...

A story that keeps one guessing until the end... An intelligent and gripping novel

Achingly beautiful and moving... This is a splendid novel by a master of the craft

The Rights of Desire is a book rooted in a place and a time where collective reality is taking a battering and where people are having to rely on themselves to make sense of what is coming into shape. Out of ...

A story that keeps one guessing until the end... An intelligent and gripping novel

Achingly beautiful and moving... This is a splendid novel by a master of the craft

The Rights of Desire is a book rooted in a place and a time where collective reality is taking a battering and where people are having to rely on themselves to make sense of what is coming into shape. Out of ...

A story that keeps one guessing until the end... An intelligent and gripping novel

Achingly beautiful and moving... This is a splendid novel by a master of the craft

Books by André Brink

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