Cape Fever - by Nadia Davids (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"It's a stunner." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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

"Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving."
--Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

"Taut plotting, electric prose, and Soraya's paranoid first-person narration set this slim, atmospheric novel apart. Gothic touches combine with elements of magical realism and real-life historical horrors to forge a chilling fable that's at once familiar and singular."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"A tense, atmospheric gothic thriller...This novel will remind readers that our world has been interconnected for a long time, and that the powerful affect those less so, even when there are oceans between them. This beautifully assured novel interweaves the ghostly and the historical until both feel simultaneously real and imagined."
--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"Davids' work is a song, a hundred years in the past or a hundred years in the future, that will continue to vibrate. Timeless, enriching, and just beautiful, Cape Fever now has a place on my bookshelf among the greats."
--Cebo Campbell


"Languid and claustrophobic, what appears at first as a demure, strait-laced read satisfyingly proceeds towards a tinderbox of rebellion and potential revolution."
--The Financial Times

"Set in a colonial city after the first world war, this story of a battle of wills between an elderly widow and her young servant is deftly told... Fiercely intelligent and wildly alive."
--The Guardian

"A gothic thriller with a supernatural twist, Nadia Davids' Cape Fever surprises and delights as it explores the complex racial landscape of 1920s Cape Town, South Africa."
--BookPage

"Davids assembles the requisite parts of a Gothic novel -- a hysterical woman, a haunted dwelling, a perverse family secret -- into an elegant narrative, one roomy enough to accommodate revenge."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A taut and immersive blend of gothic horror, psychological thriller, and literary fiction, Cape Fever is a timeless and timely exploration of money, class, and history."
--Amazon Book Review

"If you ever wondered if a Gothic thriller had room for racial microaggressions and critiques of empire, this is the book for you."
--The New York Times

"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

"A slim, taut, haunting novel... a gorgeously evocative portrait of a time and place whose reverberations continue to rock our world today."
--Lucy Caldwell

"An arresting, brooding novel set in the outpost of an empire nonimmune to the devastations of war."
--Leila Aboulela

-"A brilliant exploration of power and the complex dance between servant and served. This is a novel that sparkles with intelligence and atmosphere--a masterful blend of social observation and gothic suspense that will stay with you long after the final page."
--Sarah Ladipo Manyika

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.