A Conspiracy Of Mothers by Colleen van Niekerk
Thanks to Betsy DeJesu of Shreve Williams Public Relations, LLC, I am giving away one print copy of ‘A Conspiracy Of Mothers’ by Colleen van Niekerk.
Description Conspiracy Of Mothers by Colleen van Niekerk
From a bold new voice in literary fiction comes a compelling story of three mothers whose lives intersect during a generation-defining period in South Africa’s history.
The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man.
But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own. Ingrid’s very existence is proof of a white man’s crime, and that man’s mother will do anything―even kill―to ensure the truth remains buried.
An evocative debut novel set during a defining period in history, A Conspiracy of Mothers tells a gripping story of love and betrayal from multiple perspectives while deftly balancing the painful legacy of apartheid with the trials of motherhood.
Praise Conspiracy Of Mothers by Colleen van Niekerk
“The fierce maternal instincts of an entire community of women drive this unforgettable debut novel. Van Niekerk paints a vivid portrait of how the political was personal, and often tangled to the point of rot, in this time and place. These characters, their resilience, and van Niekerk’s reverence for her native South Africa make for an unforgettable read.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Reading Colleen van Niekerk’s A Conspiracy of Mothers was a gut-wrenching, emotional roller-coaster experience, with many lines resonating with my own belief that for South Africans to attain restorative justice, we first need to experience restorative memory. Colleen captures all this so well in cameos of captured time, which closely touched many a raw nerve of yet-unhealed wounds that are part of many of our lives. The world of lies and secrets and the pain that goes with it are vividly brought to life.” —Patric Tariq Mellet, author of The Lie of 1652: A decolonized history of land
“Deeply affecting and beautifully rendered, A Conspiracy of Mothers is a tapestry woven with sacrifice, suffering, and loss but also with a love between generations of women so deep it invokes ancestral magic that defies the laws of space and time. This story of pilgrimage and reckoning amid the unraveling of apartheid should resonate with anyone interested in breaking down systems of racism and oppression, wherever they exist. A brilliant novel to be read alongside Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.” —Susan Bernhard, author of Winter Loon
About Colleen van Niekerk
(c) Kim Culbert
Growing up in South Africa as a person of colour in the eighties and nineties, meant being surrounded by stories, not literature. It meant being surrounded by art as an extension of the vital act of expression that inevitably takes root under systems of oppression, and not as museum material.
Writing, I learned, had to be an act of subversion, in a society where, as a South African singer once said “Afrikaners is plesierig”, meaning Afrikaners (the then dominant force behind apartheid), are pleasant, polite, this said with a healthy dose of irony of course. That same politeness contrasted with the blood and bone politics of survival.
Writing was about working with the materials you had, in a society intent on telling you that you were less, intent on insisting that you had less. You wrote because you had something to say and it needed to be said. That was the urgency of the time.
Those lessons, along with a healthy serving of magic realism, Tom Robbins, André Brink, Louis de Berniéres, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker made for an incubation that served me well in later years. The times, the circumstances, the challenges have changed but the urgency, the lure of stories (aren’t they as essential as food ?) and the vitality of writing remains a part of who I am and what I produce.
Website: https://www.colleenvanniekerk.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/colleenwriter
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Giveaway Conspiracy Of Mothers by Colleen van Niekerk
This giveaway is open worldwide and ends on November 26, 2021 midnight pacific time. Entries are accepted via Rafflecopter only.
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