Crooked Seeds

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—from the Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island

In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police department. 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 their land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with 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?

Deirdre doesn’t know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she overshadowed by her brother, then abandoned by her daughter, Deidre has been left to watch over her aging mother, making do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors. But 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 confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains.

In exquisitely spare prose, Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel about collective guilt, national traumas, and the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.