Cape Fever - by Nadia Davids (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From award-winning South African author Nadia Davids comes a gothic psychological thriller set in the 1920s, where a young maid finds herself entangled with the spirits of a decaying manor and the secrets of its enigmatic owner.

I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.

The year is 1920, in a small, unnamed city in a colonial empire. Soraya Matas believes she has found the ideal job as a personal maid to the eccentric Mrs. Hattingh, whose beautiful, decaying home is not far from The Muslim Quarter where Soraya lives with her parents. As Soraya settles into her new role, she discovers that the house is alive with spirits.

While Mrs. Hattingh eagerly awaits her son's visit from London, she offers to help Soraya stay in touch with her fiancé Nour by writing him letters on her behalf. So begins a strange weekly meeting where Soraya dictates and Mrs. Hattingh writes--a ritual that binds the two women to one another and eventually threatens the sanity of both.

Cape Fever is a masterful blend of gothic themes, folk-tales, and psychological suspense, reminiscent of works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Daphne du Maurier, and Soraya Matas is an unforgettable narrator, whose story of love and grief, is also a chilling exploration of class and the long reach of history.

Review Quotes

"The Cape Town that Nadia Davids summons up in her invaluable body of work is a riven, achingly sad place of shadows, quite unlike the comfortable, sleepy Mother City of the colonial imagination."
--JM COETZEE, winner of the Nobel Prize

"Cape Fever is a slim, taut, haunting novel - a gorgeously evocative portrait of a time and place whose reverberations continue to rock our world today. Indeed, the book slips effortlessly between worlds - taking in the mysteries of storytelling, the mysticism of Islam, the psychic intrusions that are symptomatic of the power dynamics between an avaricious employer and her reluctant servant - showing the temporal circumstances that can imprison us, and the ways we have of freeing ourselves. The writing is poised and assured, the characters complex, nuanced and so very real. It is an utterly beguiling read."
--LUCY CALDWELL, author of These Days and Winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

About the Author

Nadia Davids is an acclaimed South African playwright, novelist, academic, and former President of PEN South Africa. Her debut novel An Imperfect Blessing was shortlisted for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Her plays At Her Feet and What Remains have been staged internationally. She has been a visiting scholar/artist at the University of California, Berkeley, and at New York University, the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and has taught theater at Queen Mary University of London and literature at the University of Cape Town. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The American Scholar, Astra Magazine, The Georgia Review, and Zyzzyva Magazine. She won the 2024 Caine Prize for her short story, "Bridling." She lives in California and was a writer in residence at Aspen Writes.