Ghost Limb

About the book

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...