KDL Recommends

Skinner's Drift: A Novel

ISBN: 0743272994

Title: Skinner's Drift: A Novel

Author: Lisa Fugard

KDL Description:

Returning to her South African home to attend the death of her violent father, Eva van Rensburg is forced to confront a terrible childhood secret, in a tale set against a backdrop of the region’s troubled history.

Amazon Description:

In this beautiful, brave, and extraordinarily moving first novel Era van Rensburg comes to terms with her family’s violent past as her homeland, South Africa, confronts its own bloody history. Ten years after leaving the country of her birth and the place where her mother died, Eva returns to her dying father, a reckless hunter whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner’s Drift, the family farm on a rugged stretch of land where jackals and leopards still roam.

Lisa Fugard paints a mesmerizing portrait of a family careering toward disaster — the isolation of Eva’s rebellious and lonely English mother; the desperation of her Afrikaner father as drought destroys his farm; the conflicts among the black farm workers as the younger generation questions the loyalty and subservience of their elders; and the dangerous silence of a young girl who witnesses and understands too much.

In Skinner’s Drift, Fugard has written a profoundly moving family drama, subtly set against the backdrop of a country in turmoil. She moves with extraordinary agility between intimate and revelatory domestic scenes and the fiercely challenging land, “like the ravaged hide of some ancient beast.”

Skinner’s Drift is a brave, haunting story from a stunning new writer.