It’s the late Eighties in Strand, a small coastal town southwest of Cape Town. When Johanna, a new maid, arrives at the home of a dominee’s family, nobody imagines that she will capture the family in her web of emotional complexity. The narrator daughter develops an ambivalent friendship with the new recruit but Johanna remains an enigma. She is at once mercurial and full of fun, playing children’s games and making mischief, but also has periodic rages, throwing bricks and abusing animals – and eventually turning on the children.
After her arrival, Johanna joins a pack of roving neighbourhood children that includes the daughter and her brothers. Together they find a form of belonging and imaginative outlet in the stifling religious community. But when a shift...
Almini van der Merwe studied English literature at University of Stellenbosch (B.A in Language and Culture), followed by an Honours degree in English Studies and finally a Masters, which she did not complete, electing instead to join the creative-writing programme at University of Cape Town in 2009, where she was mentored by Stephen Watson. She has worked as an editor, copywriter and translator and is currently living in Liechtenstein, working on her second novel while raising ten-month-old twins.
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