The Book of Happenstance - by Ingrid Winterbach (Paperback)

About the Book

While creating a dictionary of Afrikaans words that have fallen out of use, Helena gets involved in investigating a robbery.

Book Synopsis

"This is an extraordinary story from an extraordinary writer. . . . If you haven't experienced the mind of Ingrid Winterbach yet, she is a writer who clings to your soul."--Pretoria News

A middle-aged lexicographer, Helena Verbloem, travels alone to Durban to assist in the creation of a dictionary of Afrikaans words that have fallen out of use. Shortly after her arrival, her apartment is burglarized, and her collection of precious shells, shells that she had been collecting for a lifetime, is stolen. Meeting with indifference from the local police, she decides to investigate the crime on her own, with the help of her new friend from the Museum of Natural History, Sof. While investigating the crime, Helena reflects on the life she's lived--her ex-husband, her daughter, her lovers, her childhood--and begins to fall in love with her married boss, Theo Verway.

An alternately sublime and satirical meditation on love, loss, and obsession, Ingrid Winterbach's The Book of Happenstance is an emotionally affecting masterpiece from one of South Africa's most exciting authors.

Ingrid Winterbach is an artist and novelist whose work has won the M-Net Prize, Old Mutual Literary Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing, and the W.A. Hofmeyr Prize. She's also received the Hertzog Prize, an honor she shares with Breyten Breytenbach and Etienne Leroux.

Review Quotes

"Winterbach... executes an intelligent literary mystery in this account of Helena Verbloem, a Cape Town lexicographer who has been hired to assist expert Theo Verwey in compiling a dictionary of old Afrikaans ... Winterbach's characters are rich, her story foreboding and tense, and her prose remarkably lean."--Publishers Weekly

"A stealth gem, Winterbach's [...] captivating book offers up a fascinating heroine, made all the more so for her lack of so-called endearing qualities. This is a challenging portrait of an artist that defies easy categorization."-- Kirkus

"Like many of us, Helena seeks answers in origins, in the stories that science and religion have to offer. We tell stories, we do science, and yet these are things which only teach us more about the un-narratable, the un-catalogable. We cut at the joints but the cut is never clean. Winterbach brings the reader face to face with their own apophenic impulses to find patterns of significance in randomly assembled fragments. We look for clues, we hope to connect the dots that Helena, caught up in her obsessions, cannot, to find the lost shells, to restore order."--Jesse Miller, Full-Stop

"This text is, in all meanings of the word, sublime."--Die Burger

"In her latest novel Ingrid Winterbach is at her best: complex, smart, mischievous and without equal."--Beeld

"Winterbach is a remarkable stylist--the voice, and much of the presentation impresses tremendously."--Complete Review

About the Author

Ingrid Winterbach is an artist and novelist whose work has won the M-Net Prize, Old Mutual Literary Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing, and the W.A. Hofmeyr Prize. She's also received the Hertzog Prize, an honor she shares with Breyten Breytenbach and Etienne Leroux.