Skinner’s Drift

Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner’s Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam.

In this beautiful, brave, and extraordinarily moving first novel, Lisa Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a young woman coming to terms with her family’s violent past as her homeland, South Africa, confronts its own bloody history. Fugard moves with extraordinary agility between intimate and revelatory domestic scenes and the fiercely challenging land, “like the ravaged hide of some ancient beast.” This is a powerful story from a stunning new writer.