a conspiracy of mothers by colleen van niekerk

Then it came like a switch: the sound of a belt buckle. Exhaustion had drained her of the will to keep them at bay. But a cluster of ghouls sat at the periphery of her mind. Review: Us Against You by Fredrik Backmanįatigued, she looked up at the ceiling of her bedroom before drifting into an unsettled half sleep. An insomniac accustomed to resting in the security of daylight, she was finding herself too disturbed to get much sleep at all. It illuminated the shards of her broken heart that she’d so carefully papered over. These two words had come over several weeks now, straining Yolanda’s worn spirit where it felt held together by rusted rivets, pushing at the tight, painful places within her. Rachel, her mother, was beckoning her away from this Virginia hamlet and back to Cape Town’s unforgiving shore, as if an absence of eighteen years was nothing at all. Two words, drifting in with the scent of fresh rain and wet soil, with the sound of horses neighing in the nearby stables. It was Ma’s voice again, wafting in on the wind that raised the tattered net curtain of Yolanda’s bedroom like a hand. Yet fear rises in her like bile, for this night brings more with it than shadows.Ĭome home, the voice said, the one she heard after she closed her eyes and lay down on her bed.

Weary, she knows that she will always face the night alone, no matter who is in the room, who is in her bed. Darkness sets upon Yolanda, heavy and tight as a vise. It is not a void but a time when the presence of other things pushes forward. Ingrid’s very existence is proof of a white man’s crime, and that man’s mother will do anything-even kill-to ensure the truth remains buried.Īn evocative debut novel set during a defining period in history, A Conspiracy of Mothers tells a gripping story of love and betrayal from multiple perspectives while deftly balancing the painful legacy of apartheid with the trials of motherhood. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man.īut Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and excerpt from Colleen van Niekerk’s A Conspiracy of Mothers, which is out now! From a bold new voice in literary fiction comes a compelling story of three mothers whose lives intersect during a generation-defining period in South Africa’s history.

A conspiracy of mothers by colleen van niekerk