Philida (Vintage International)
Eminent white Afrikaans writer Brink tells a story that is rooted in his own familys ancestry and set in the Cape in the early nineteenth century, before the abolition of slavery. Philida is raped by her white farm-master, Cornelis. Later his young son, Frans, has his first sex with her. Unlike his father, Frans loves her and wants to marry her, and she loves him as much as she loves her children. Frans is reluctant to marry the wealthy white girl his family has chosen for him, even if it will save his father from bankruptcy. With alternating present-tense viewpoints, the aching personal drama is set against the history of lechery, power, and violent abuse, the constant beatings, the breeding of slaves for auction, and always, for Philida, the wrenching family separation as she tries to prevent the selling of her children. This stirring novel opens up the horror, seldom addressed, of the oppression long before apartheid was the law. --Hazel Rochman