Cape Fever: A Novel - Hardcover

Davids, Nadia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1668090732 ISBN 13: 9781668090732

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“I loved this book. It’s beautiful. I thought about it so much after I read it.” —Sarah Jessica Parker
“It’s a stunner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner.

I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.

The year is 1920, in 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.

Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nadia Davids is an acclaimed South African playwright, novelist, academic, and former President of PEN South Africa. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her plays At Her Feet and What Remains have been staged internationally. She has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California, Berkeley, and at New York University, the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and has taught theater at Queen Mary University of London and literature at the University of Cape Town. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Zyzzyva Magazine. She won the 2024 Caine Prize for her short story, “Bridling.” She lives in California and was a writer in residence at Aspen Writes. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One ONE
23 Heron Place

The Cape

Southern Cross Colony

March 12, 1920

I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read. She conducts the interview in her kitchen, a large room on a street of houses grand and gabled that look out onto the dipped bowl of our harbor city. A row of homes, my father told me, for doctors and ambassadors. When she says the position is for a combined cleaner-cook, I realize she is not as wealthy as her house—its address and ornaments—suggests. I glance past the kitchen door to the corridor, and though the light is dim I notice rows of variously sized rectangles, solid blocks of deep maroon, shades darker than the rest of the wallpaper. Paintings must once have hung there. Perhaps she has had to sell them, and now the memory of each casts a precise and permanent shadow. It is likely she lost part of her fortune in the war. Well, who hasn’t? Even those of us who had no fortune to begin with have felt the pinch and scrape and cost of all those trenches and guns and explosions. The kitchen, however, is still well equipped. In the end, as my mother would say, it is the pots, not the paintings, that survive.

So here we are, in the room in which I will be expected to collude in her deceits, concoct dishes for dinner parties that hide her poverty, mind the number of eggs, keep up appearances. I can do that. I am used to culinary economy, to careful pride.

She is holding the letter up to a wide window, squinting with effort as though the words will unfurl in the morning light. The paper is thin as a breeze, the writing as spidery as my previous employer Mrs. Edenburg’s spite.

Mrs. Hattingh asks me the usual questions, her voice now firm, now breathless. “How old are you, girl?”

“Nineteen, madam.”

“You look younger. I suppose it is because you are so slight. How long have you been in service?”

“Since I was twelve, madam. First as a scullery maid and then as Cook’s helper.”

“Why did you leave the Edenburgs? Such a glowing reference, I can’t imagine why they’d let you go.”

To this I say that Cook had never liked me, that she’d wanted my position for her own daughter, that she’d connived to get rid of me! I touch a finger to my lips; days ago, it had been swollen to a bloody pout, but it’s calmed since, just a small bump now, dark and tender. Don’t worry, my mother had said when she first saw it, the mouth heals quickly.

“I do hope she taught you to cook before all this intrigue?” Around Mrs. Hattingh’s mouth a smile dances.

“Oh yes, madam. I helped Cook for three years. She taught me the settlers’ dishes and my mother taught me our food.”

“But how wonderful! Can you make that lovely spiced mince dish with dried mint… kee… kee… the name escapes me now.”

“Keema. Yes, madam.”

“What about the almond dessert with rose water? And cardamom doughnuts?”

I nod.

“Excellent. We shall get along famously. I always hire your people if I can help it, Soraya. I’ve long admired the skilled cleverness of your men and the industriousness and modesty of your women, even if some say the former is merely cunning and the latter crippling shyness.”

“Yes, madam. Thank you, madam.”

“In fact”—she leans forward and drops her voice even though there is no one about to hear us—“I feel a kinship with your people. You are not really from here either. Yes, yes, brought by force where we came by design, but still, like us, your kind made this colony what it is.”

Ah, she’s one of those, the ones who think themselves infinitely better than us and us somewhat better than the others, and believes that sharing this will inspire my loyalty, hard work, thankfulness. My mother—herself descended in part from the First People Mrs. Hattingh so easily dismisses—would have given one of her stock responses, such as We are hard workers indeed, but I say nothing. Let her make of that what she may.

Mrs. Hattingh also asks some unusual questions.

“Do you think you’ll be happy here?”

“Yes, madam.”

“You won’t mind such an empty house?”

I have to stop a laugh running free from my throat, for what servant would prefer more people to clean up after?

“Would you like to have a look around before you give your answer?”

I shake my head, because, really, there is nothing else to see; the wage is fair, the house large but mostly vacant, and, more, there is no man about to trouble us.

It is only then that she announces that the position is for a live-in maid. Her voice quavers as she reveals this, and I know that she knows this is an unreasonable request, sprung late. Neither of us needs state that to sleep here is to be not only cook and cleaner but companion and protector too. I protest (very faintly) that 23 Heron Place is not far from my family’s home in the Quarter, that I could come to her early each morning and would not leave until my duties for the day are fulfilled. At this she dips her chin like a small, frail bird, her lips tremble, her hands reach for her long, swaying necklace that runs all the way to her waist. She clutches and rolls the garnet beads lying gleaming and purple against her dark dress as though she were praying and does not answer me directly; instead, she turns her eyes to the back garden and whispers something about holiday half pay. I understand then that my nights are a condition of employment, that she wants my sleeping hours as well as my waking ones, that there is only one answer to secure the job, and so I give it: I will sleep here every night of the week and go home but one Sunday a fortnight.

Her head snaps up, and with a full smile she tells me how much safer she feels already, just knowing I will be here.

My face twitches into a sneer that I try to still. My mother gave me just two lessons before I set out to my first job all those years ago, and I am already failing at one of them: The first was to do as I was told as well as I could, to wash, cook and clean as though I were caring for my own home and person. The second was how to arrange my face. Always keep something back, she told me, there is no need for them to know what you are truly thinking.

So I do not tell Mrs. Hattingh that I am useless in a crisis, have never bested anyone in self-defense and have no intention of shielding her at any cost to myself against marauding burglars or mountain baboons. She rises to her feet and announces that she will give me a tour of the house and steps into a quick march as I trail after her. At each door we pause, and she names the room behind it. The breathy voice has turned no-nonsense: “Pantry, dining room, sitting room, guest room, gun room, my late husband’s study.”

She speaks and walks at such a speed that words and feet seem to trip up on each other. The pace, I realize, is because this is all so unbearable, for this is not something that would ordinarily fall to her. In a house of this size, for a family of this station, it should be the task of the housekeeper, not the employer, to show the new housemaid what’s what.

But Mrs. Hattingh is forging ahead—almost as if she were another person now, made brisk by the business of it all. She points, and as she does so, she instructs: “You will dust daily, the windows must be washed once a week. You see how very tall they are?...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668090732
• ISBN 13: 9781668090732
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: webstar; casetta@mondadori.it; ; Via Mondadori 1,; Segrate Milano; 20090; Italien