Skinner's Drift

Lisa Fugard

I liked this the best of all the stories I’ve read about white people in post-apartheid South Africa. This maybe because it is told from a woman’s point of view. Everything is there, the blood, the politics, the fear, the beautiful country, the soul searching but also a more practical sense of dealing with it all rather than wailing about it.

Extract

Eva lay on the bed at the Misty Mountain, the last of Lorraine’s diaries resting face down beside her. She’d read halfway through it. Initially she feared coming across an entry suggesting that her mother knew about the madness of their night drives, but as she travelled through February and March, on into May and June, she grew increasingly despondent. How could her mother not have suspected that something was terribly wrong on Skinner’s Drift?

Parallels