The Afrikaner

by Arianna Dagnino

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Pub Date Apr 01 2019 | Archive Date Jul 30 2019

Guernica Editions

Multicultural Interest

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Description

Zoe Du Plessis's story unfolds against the backdrop of 1996 South Africa, caught in the turmoil of the transition from the Apartheid regime to the first democratically elected black government. A paleoanthropologist at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, her world collapses when her lover and colleague, Dario Oldani, is killed during a fatal carjacking.

Clinging to her late companion's memory, Zoe sets off to the merciless Kalahari Desert to continue his fieldwork. It's the beginning of an inner journey during which Zoe comes to terms with her sense of guilt as a privileged white Afrikaner while also confronting a secret that has hung over her family for generations. During a brief visit back home, Zoe meets an unlikely lover in Kurt, a legendary South African writer with a troubled past.

The conclusion spirals the reader into a new perspective, where atonement seems to be inextricably linked to an act of creative imagination.

Zoe Du Plessis's story unfolds against the backdrop of 1996 South Africa, caught in the turmoil of the transition from the Apartheid regime to the first democratically elected black government. A...

Advance Praise

"A compelling narrative about the life and the psychology of a strong, intelligent, introspective woman in agony (her fiancé was shot dead), and the diverse people she deals with… Arianna Dagnino’s English prose is precise and brilliant… I dare to say that The Afrikaner is the first important gift the New Year brings to literary culture." --Giannalberto Bendazzi, author of Animation: A World History.

"Arianna Dagnino's transcultural novel of a young woman's struggle to recover from the brutal killing of her lover, cope with her family's tragic past and find her way in post-Apartheid South Africa, is both moving and memorable. Dagnino, drawing on her years as a journalist in South Africa, de-layers the country's conflicts, introduces some remarkable characters and takes the reader on a spellbinding journey." -- Ian Thomas Shaw, author of Quill of the Dove.

"Set in a South Africa trying to adjust to the recent end of apartheid, The Afrikaner is the compelling story of a fossil-hunter haunted by her family curse. Wise in the ways of paleoanthropology, viticulture, history, and the complex choreography of Boer, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Bushmen, and others, Arianna Dagnino’s novel fulfills its protagonist’s vision of art: “Imagination in motion." ---Steven G. Kellman, University of Texas at San Antonio.

Marketing Plan

Pre-publication reviews and interviews have appeared in The Saturday Star and are forthcoming in a selection of other literary and review journals. .