Overview

A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family's troubled past in this taut and compelling novel from the Booker Prize longlisted author of An Island. In her parched, crumbling corner of a Cape Town public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the police. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her family's former home, after decades underground. Detectives pepper her with questions about her brother, and his dealings with a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s with terrorist leanings. Deirdre doesn't know the answers to most of these questions. All she knows is that she was denied-repeatedly-the life she felt she deserved. But 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 confront her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge from what remains. Crooked Seeds is a singularly powerful novel, in exquisitely spare prose, about the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making.

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9781922790675

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‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’ * Roddy Doyle * 'A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story.’ * Elleke Boehmer on An Island * ‘Thoroughly absorbing…Merciless political critique and allegory rendered in tender prose.’ * Guardian on An Island * 'A disturbing masterpiece.' * Good Reading on An Island * ‘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 *

‘This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost bearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.’ * Roddy Doyle * ‘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 * '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 * 'A gripping, terrifying and unforgettable story.’ * Elleke Boehmer on An Island * ‘Thoroughly absorbing…Merciless political critique and allegory rendered in tender prose.’ * Guardian on An Island *

Author Information

Karen Jennings is a South African writer whose novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives in Cape Town and is a writer-in-residence at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past, Stellenbosch University.

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