Ancestral Voices (UK Edition), Allison & Busby 1993, London.
“It reminds one of One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez: The history of a country and a
nation told in the form of a family chronicle - realistic but visionary,
fantastic, mythical.”
*
“The hand of a master.”
NRC Handelsblad, Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
“Etienne van Heerden is
the brightest light in the firmament of younger Afrikaans writers and his
exploration of personal relations and private lives under the pressure of
historical and political forces makes him an eloquent witness of this moment of
profound social change in the country.”
André Brink, author
of The Rights of Desire
Sleeve
information (US Edition)
| For more than
one hundred years the Moolmans have farmed the land of the Eastern Cape.
In that time they have developed an ethic as unyielding as the soil
itself. The Moolmans have no tolerance for betrayal: parents cut children
out of their lives without a second thought and never mention their names
again.
And sometimes, perhaps, an offending child suffers a more thorough kind of annihilation. Or so it appears when Noah, a boy who seemed not entirely of this world, dies tragically and mysteriously. When a magistrate is sent to investigate Noah’s death, he uncovers a case whose complexities threaten the very foundations of the law. For judging Noah’s killer means judging an entire dynasty, both the living and the dead. As recounted in this haunting novel, Noah’s death and the ensuing inquest transcend the conventions of the murder mystery. In its stark portrayal of a suicidally insular clan, Ancestral Voices gives us a vision of the Afrikaner inheritance. (Back to Novels) |