ABOUT
THE BOOK

Flip Lochner, fifty-nine-year old crime reporter, has an undistinguished career and a failed marriage behind him. A chance encounter with a boy from Devil’s Valley to the north-east of Cape Town re-kindles a long-buried ambition in this cynical and embittered man: to chart the history of the isolated community which has inhabited the valley for the last hundred and fifty years. Setting off with his tape recorder and an ample supply of cigarettes, Lochner enters the world of a solitary white tribe, where a semblance of righteousness prevails by day and outright depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanours is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. The women of the valley are utterly subservient to their menfolk, all outsiders are viewed with extreme suspicion and those who uncomfortably remind the community about the original sin at the root of their history are stoned to keep the blood pure. As lightening storms flay the parched valley, Lochner searches for the truth behind the stories and folk legends of these misfits and miscreants, yet each new story contradicts the last and the certainties he has been trained to unearth simply evaporate. Then, his own obsession with the mysterious Emma draws him onto even more dangerous ground. Resonant and darkly humorous, Devil’s Valley is a sumptuous entertainment from a master storyteller.