The Shape of Him by Gill Schierhout

Description

Sara Highbury, now forty-eight years old and the manageress of a boarding house, is living in the aftermath of a love affair with Herbert Wakeford, a one-time diamond digger who suffers from a degenerative brain condition.Now, years after their relationship ended, Sara is still haunted by Herbert and what passed between them. Set against the backdrop of the early 1900s South African mines, and the vast landscapes that connected these to Cape Town, this is a story of the loss of person and show more identity, and the struggle to hold on to life and love.As the illness takes hold, Sara watches Herbert take up with the ghosts, blown this and that way by his thoughts.In the years that follow, he is to spend much of his life in an institution, coming to visit Sara now and then, and she him. An unlikely affair leads to Herbert being named the father of an apprentice girl s child.The baby is abandoned outside Herbert s sanatorium.Unable to keep her, he sends the child, Aloma Maggie, to Sara who reluctantly agrees to look after her.In a northern mining town they board with a miner, Frank Foreman and his wife Sybil trying to construct a family, or least the web of it. When she is unable to hold off school officials and their insistence on proof of her right to care for Maggie, Sara finally has to give up custody of the girl.She struggles to recover from this second loss. Now in 1945, on the eve of Herbert s funeral, having tracked Sara down to her new position in the boarding house, an old friend, Imran Hafferjee, a one-time quality-controller at a fruit processing plant, brings news about this girl, news that will challenge all that Sara has held dear. This novel introduces a writer whose spare, exquisitely crafted prose places her deservedly in the tradition of South African writers such as J M Coetzee and Marlene van Niekerk. With the backdrop of a rural South African landscape and characters that are as memorable as they are unexpected, this is a beautifully imagined love story that will break your heart. show less