Books by Marlene Van Niekerk
Agaat
Set in apartheid South Africa, Agaat portrays the unique relationship between Milla, a 67-year-old white woman, and her black maidservant turned caretaker, Agaat. Through flashbacks and diary entries, the reader learns about Milla's past. Life for white farmers in 1950s South Africa was full of promise young and newly married, Milla raised a son and created her own farm out of a swathe of Cape mountainside. Forty years later her family has fallen apart, the country she knew is on the brink of huge change, and all she has left are memories and her proud, contrary, yet affectionate guardian. With haunting, lyrical prose, Marlene Van Niekerk creates a story of love and family loyalty. Winner of the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2007, Agaat was translated as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns, who received the Sol Plaatje Award for his translation.
Copies
No copies available.
Agaat
“I was immediately mesmerized . . . as brilliant as it is haunting.” ―Toni Morrison
In 1940s apartheid South Africa, Milla de Wet discovers a child abandoned in the fields of her family farm. Ignoring the warnings of friends and family, Milla brings the girl, Agaat, into her home. But the kindness is fleeting, as Milla makes Agaat her maidservant and, later, a nanny for her son. At turns cruel and tender, this relationship between a wealthy white woman and her Black maidservant is constantly fraught and shaped by a rigid social order.
Decades later, Milla is confined to her bed with ALS, and is quickly losing her ability to communicate. Her family has fallen apart, her country is on the brink of change, and all she has left are her memories―and a reckoning with the only person who remains by her side: Agaat. In complex and devastating ways, the power shifts between the two women, mirroring the historic upheavals happening around them and revealing a shared lifetime of hopes, sacrifices, and control.
Hailed as an international masterpiece, Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat is a haunting and deeply layered saga of resilience, loyalty, betrayal, and how the passage of time cannot heal all wounds.
Copies
No copies available.
Triomf
by The Overlook Press, Marlene Van Niekerk
This is the story of the four inhabitants of 127 Martha Street in the poor white suburb of Triomf. Living on the ruins of old Sophiatown, the freehold township razed to the ground as a so-called 'black spot', they await with trepidation their country's first democratic elections. It is a date that coincides fatefully with the fortieth birthday of Lambert, the oversexed misfit son of the house. There is also Treppie, master of misrule and family metaphysician; Pop, the angel of peace teetering on the brink of the grave; and Mol, the materfamilias in her eternal housecoat. Pestered on a daily basis by nosy neighbors, National Party canvassers and Jehovah's Witnesses, defenseless against the big city towering over them like a vengeful dinosaur, they often resort to quoting to each other the only consolation that they know; we still have each other and a roof over our heads. Triomf relentlessly probes Afrikaner history and politics, revealing the bizarre and tragic effect that apartheid had on exactly the white underclass who were most supposed to benefit. It is also a seriously funny investigation of the human endeavor to make sense of life even under the most abject of circumstances.
Copies
No copies available.
Triomf
by The Overlook Press, Marlene Van Niekerk
This is the story of the four inhabitants of 127 Martha Street in the poor white suburb of Triomf. Living on the ruins of old Sophiatown, the freehold township razed to the ground as a so-called 'black spot', they await with trepidation their country's first democratic elections. It is a date that coincides fatefully with the fortieth birthday of Lambert, the oversexed misfit son of the house. There is also Treppie, master of misrule and family metaphysician; Pop, the angel of peace teetering on the brink of the grave; and Mol, the materfamilias in her eternal housecoat. Pestered on a daily basis by nosy neighbors, National Party canvassers and Jehovah's Witnesses, defenseless against the big city towering over them like a vengeful dinosaur, they often resort to quoting to each other the only consolation that they know; we still have each other and a roof over our heads. Triomf relentlessly probes Afrikaner history and politics, revealing the bizarre and tragic effect that apartheid had on exactly the white underclass who were most supposed to benefit. It is also a seriously funny investigation of the human endeavor to make sense of life even under the most abject of circumstances.
Copies
No copies available.