NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

This is ‘an escape into the country tale’ with a difference. The narrator and her family are forced to move to a run down property after suffering a financial setback. She had thought she was doing the right thing by marrying a rich man but the eccentric inventor thirty years older than her should have come with a health warning. The rented property to which they were reduced had no electricity, no water in the bathroom, and a magnificent kitchen consisting of a coal stove and a crooked tap plus an untamed garden. It was a considerable shock to the system for a white South African of the nineteen-sixties used to being sheltered and pampered at every turn to have to undertake hard labour. There are unexpected benefits in the form of the new acquaintances she makes. There is Joshua the Sangoman, May her indomitable maid, Ben a Jewish pig farmer and the Indians who run the local general store all with completely different views on life.
The account of the heroine’s trials and tribulations is very funny but underlying it is a sense of the liberation that is possible when someone moves outside a role that is severely circumscribed by politics and habit and allows herself to be part of a larger world.