num_pages: 288
description: Katrijn van der Caab freed slave and wigmakers apprentice travels with her eccentric employer from Cape Town to Vogelzang a remote farm where a hairless girl needs their services. The year is 1794 it is the age of enlightenment and on Vogelzang the master is conducting strange experiments in human breeding and classification. It is also here that Trijn falls in love.Two hundred years later and a thousand miles away Sister Vergilius a nun at a mission hospital wants to free herself from an austere order. It is 1961 and her life intertwines with that of a gentleman farmer  an Englishman and suspected Communist  who collects and studies insects and lives a solitary life. While a group of Americans arrive in a cavalcade of caravans and a new republic is about to be born desire is unfurling slowly.In Claire Robertsons majestic debut novel two stories echo across centuries to expose that which binds us and sets us free.About the author:Claire Robertson lives in Simons Town. She has spent the past 30 years as a journalist reporting from South Africa the US and USSR. She has worked in newspapers magazines radio and television and now works as a senior copy editor on the Sunday Times. She has won awards for her reporting and her work is carried in several anthologies.
language: English
title: The Spiral House
publisher: Umuzi