Overview

On the 1st December 1838, all slaves were finally freed on South Africa, four years after slavery had officially been abolished. First of December follows three people during the week of November 1838: James and Caroline Kendrick, and an unnamed runaway slave making her way to Cape Town along the coast, desperate to reach it by midnight on the 31st November. Caroline is trapped in an unhappy marriage, in a place she hates, always longing to go home; bored, lonely, without purpose or any sense of belonging. James is forever on the move, desperate for success after a lifetime of failure and humiliation, seeing South Africa as his last great hope, preparing for the climax of his work, a bank to serve the city. Each resents the other, feeling trapped and unloved, yet with a wish for it all to change. Meanwhile the slave-apprentice, fearful of being caught before the deadline, meets others living on the coast, at the edge of society, yet always remaining alone, without any clear idea of what to expect in Cape Town.

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9781068316418

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Karen Jennings is a South African writer whose novel An Island was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021, with the follow-up longlisted for The Women's Prize in 2025. She was writer-in-residence as a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory for the Economics of Africa's Past, Stellenbosch University. Karen currently lectures at North-West University. She received the K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award in 2021, and has won the Africa Region Prize of the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her first novel, Finding Soutbek, was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize. Travels with my Father, a memoir, has been a set university text in South Africa. Karen founded The Island Prize for unpublished African authors to help them get published globally. Now in its fifth year the prize has helped authors from all over the continent.

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