The Devil's Chimney

In the shadows of the Cango Caves in rural South Africa lives Connie Lambrecht, dazed by alcohol and devastating memories. A "poor white," she is haunted by the disappearance of a young "colored" girl in a passage called the Devil's Chimney and obsessed with the story of an Englishwoman who arrived with her husband in 1910 to run an ostrich farm during the international craze for ostrich plumes. The story of Miss Beatrice--a lushly told tale of passion and transgression, violence and tragedy, retribution and redemption--entwines in surprising ways with Connie's own dark secrets. Set against a harsh, dazzling landscape and a social system in which the lives of women and black people are equally expendable--and compared by reviewers to the works of Alice Munro, J. M. Coetzee, and Flannery O'Connor--The Devil's Chimney is an artful, lyrical, and explosive debut.