Crooked Seeds

Jennings sets her follow-up to An Island in contemporary Cape Town, where Deidre van Deventer — an amputee, embittered, estranged from her own daughter — is drawn into a police investigation after human remains surface at her family's former property, seized years earlier by the state for its aquifer. The remains reopen the question of her brother's involvement in a pro-apartheid bombing plot in the dying days of the old regime, the same plot that cost Deidre her leg. Jennings refuses to make Deidre sympathetic in any conventional sense, forcing the reader to sit with a genuinely unlikeable woman shaped by an unforgivable political inheritance rather than softening her for easier consumption. The prose is spare in a way that mirrors the character's own diminished circumstances.