The second novel by South African author Nadia Davids, winner of the 2024 Caine prize, is set in a “small unnamed city in a colonial empire”, shortly after the end of the first world war. We might imagine it as a version of Cape Town – birthplace of the author, and of JM Coetzee, whose endorsement appears on the back cover.
Soraya, a 19-year-old woman from the Muslim quarter, is sent by her mother to work as a maid in a wealthy part of town. Her new employer, the elderly Mrs Hattingh, is a settler who fondly recalls her days “when I was a girl in England”. When the novel opens, in 1920, Mrs Hattingh lives alone: her husband is dead, and her son, Timothy, fortunate to have survived the war, lives far away in London.
