International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award

Flip Lochner, fifty-nine-year old crime reporter, has an undistinguished career and a failed marriage behind him. A chance encounter with a boy from Devil's Valley to the north-east of Cape Town re-kindles a long-buried ambition in this cynical and embittered man: to chart the history of the isolated community which has inhabited the valley for the last hundred and fifty years. Setting off with his tape recorder and an ample supply of cigarettes, Lochner enters the world of a solitary white tribe, where a semblance of righteousness prevails by day and outright depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanours is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. The women of the valley are utterly subservient to their menfolk, all outsiders are viewed with extreme suspicion and those who uncomfortably remind the community about the original sin at the root of their history are stoned to keep the blood pure. As lightening storms flay the parched valley, Lochner searches for the truth behind the stories and folk legends of these misfits and miscreants, yet each new story contradicts the last and the certainties he has been trained to unearth simply evaporate. Then, his own obsession with the mysterious Emma draws him onto even more dangerous ground. Resonant and darkly humorous, Devil's Valley is a sumptuous entertainment from a master storyteller. André Brink was born in South Africa in 1935. He is the author of twelve novels in English, including An Instant in the Wind, A Dry White Season, A Chain of Voices, An Act of Terror, On the Contrary and Imaginings of Sand. He has won South Africa's most important literary prize, the CNA Award, three times, has twice been short-listed for the Booker Prize, and was short-listed for the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Imaginings of Sand. His novels have been translated into thirty languages and he has been awarded the Prix Medicis Etranger in France and the Premio Mondello in Italy. André Brink served on the international panel of judges for the 1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award: he is professor of English at the University of Cape Town.

Devil's Valley by André Brink Nominated by:

Devil's Valley by
André Brink

Nominated by: