Caly recommends... Cape Fever - Nadia Davids

Caly says... A gothic and suspenseful mystery about power, empire and the things that haunt us - set in 1920s colonial Africa, Cape Town. Young Soraya goes to work for the strange and eccentric Mrs Hattingh in her unnerving and claustrophobic home... It's tense, brooding and full of supernatural twistiness.  Feverish at it's finest!

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I come highly recommended to Mrs Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read. 1920, a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from the Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.

While Mrs Hattingh eagerly awaits her son’s visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes – a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

‘Slim, taut, haunting… an utterly beguiling read’ Lucy Caldwell

‘The Cape Town that Nadia Davids summons up in her invaluable body of work is a riven, achingly sad place of shadows, quite unlike the comfortable, sleepy Mother City of the colonial imagination’ J. M. Coetzee