Crooked Seeds

‘This is an extraordinary novel.  It is shattering, almost unbearable, yet – so good, so clear – it is unputdownable.’ Roddy Doyle

Deidre is a victim, of her family, her society, her history. That is how she sees herself, and so she feels free of all obligations, moral and practical. Until the police take her back to her family home…

In a Cape Town where water is rationed and has to be collected from trucks each day, with the consequences of apartheid and the ending of it still evident, Deidre lives from day to day in squalor – largely created by herself – borrowing, persuading, cadging her way from the water trucks to the bar, testing the tolerance and pity of everyone she knows. Then she is contacted by the police, and taken by a respectful constable to the house where she grew up and where she lost her leg in a shattering explosion while still young. Faced with what is found there, she has to accept the truth of her past, and of her older brother, her parents’ golden boy. Then she must confront herself and her responsibility, and what it truly is to be a victim.

‘hard to read and impossible to look away from….”Crooked Seeds” leaves us reeling’ The Washington Post

‘…stark, darkly humorous…Deirdre is such a perfectly realised fictional creation. Crooked Seeds Is not a book that “feels like a warm hug” but more what Kafka called “an axe for the frozen sea within us” .’ The Observer

‘Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. A quietly devastating novel.’ Jan Carson, author of The Raptures

‘…an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel.’ Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities

Booker Prize Judges on An Island: ‘…a moving, transfixing novel of loss, political upheaval, history, identity, all rendered in majestic and extraordinary prose.’