The highly anticipated Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings is launching in the UK tomorrow. The South African edition of this unflinching and profound novel will be published locally in early May. Please join us for The Book Lounge launch on 8 May.

About the book:

Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer. In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with questions: Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?

Deidre doesn’t know the answers to the detectives’ questions. All she knows is that she was denied – repeatedly – the life she felt she deserved. Overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbours while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. As alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country.

In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.

ISBN: 978-1-7764726-2-8

Cover artwork of the SA edition by Deborah Minné.

Praise for Crooked Seeds:

‘Karen Jennings is a modern master of the castaway novel. Her characters are often exiled from the world—physically or psychologically, sometimes both. Crooked Seeds’ Deidre and Trudy are unforgettable characters living on the margins of life. Together they make this an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel.’ – Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize

‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost unbearable, yet – so good, so clear – it is unputdownable.’ – Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

‘Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. A quietly devastating novel.’ – Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

Reviews:

“A perfectly realised fictional creation” – John Self, The Guardian

“‘Crooked Seeds’ is hard to read and impossible to look away from” – Ron Charles, The Washington Post

About the author:

KAREN JENNINGS is a South African writer whose novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. She is currently writer-in-residence as a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past (LEAP), Stellenbosch University, and is writing a novel and short stories to contribute to the project. Karen co-founded The Island Prize for unpublished African authors to help them get published globally. Now in its third year, the prize has helped authors from all over the continent, with both winners being published in the UK.