Q&A With Samantha Keller, Author of The Light Remains ____________

Book description: Against the backdrop of complicated, beautiful South Africa in the 1960s, an epic family saga unfolds.

Eve Hunter has grown up on her family's dairy farm in the Lowveld, but she's inherited more than just a love of the land—she's inherited their sorrow. When her father is electrocuted while building a barn, the tragedy exposes the dark secret that has run beneath her family's sadness for years. Eve turns to Jack, her closest friend and neighbor, for comfort.

But Jack belongs to Kate, her older sister, at least that's what their families have always assumed. As Eve and Jack's bond deepens into something more charged, Eve faces an impossible choice to either honor her family’s expectations or to follow her heart and risk everything.

Then Kate comes to her with a devastating request that could change everything between them.

The Light Remains is a story about the weight of family loyalty, the price of independence, and the choices that define us when duty and desire collide.

Buy the book here. Author Bio: Samantha Keller grew up in South Africa, and after a decade in London, moved to Connecticut, where she completed her MFA at Fairfield University. The Light Remains is Sam’s first novel, and it received an honorary mention by the Fairfield Book Prize. Sam’s short fiction won the Anthony Grooms Prize and appeared in The Connecticut Literary Anthology, 2024. Her work has been a Narrative Story of the Week, a contest finalist in American Short Fiction‘s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize. Sam’s first children's picture book, Are You An Alien?, illustrated by her mother, was published in the UK in 2025. Sam is a developmental editor and teaches creative writing. She still lives in Connecticut, US with her husband Grant and children Thomas and Chloe. 

The Light Remains is rooted in your own family history — both your maternal and paternal grandfathers died young in tragic circumstances, and the men were mythologized while the women left behind to raise children alone were largely uncelebrated. How did that personal history become the inspiration for this novel?

The death of both my grandfathers so tragically young, was the original inspiration for the novel. I was in awe of the enormity of the loss and the impact it had on my parents, who were both left fatherless from birth. As a younger person and a new writer, I approached writing this story as a way to make sense of this loss, and always saw it from the perspective of the men who’d died so young. It was only once I’d begun the novel that I started to question why this version of events was the most important perspective on the story. Both men had almost been mythologized into the family history, but what about the women who had remained and were most affected by the deaths of their husbands? Who had to continue and recover, and raise their children in a post-war world. I became more interested in my grandmothers’ stories, and as my perspective shifted, the story changed to reflect this and is now entirely different. Although my family history was a strong inspiration for The Light Remains, and although I borrowed names and events from my family’s lives, the novel is fiction.

The novel opens in 1975 with Eve already a farm manager, and then moves back in time. What drew you to that structure, and what did beginning in the present allow you to do that a strictly chronological approach wouldn't?

The dual timeline structure allowed me to visit the outcome of the secret embedded in the novel more immediately, through the direct experience of the characters. I could describe adult Eve as a woman who’d made particular choices and show the reader the result of those choices without walking them through every event that led her there. I also like the ambivalence this structure allows. It offered me a quieter way of confronting the truth and hopefully will make the reader think about the story and wonder a little bit.

Each chapter is often titled after something in the natural world — a silk worm, an aloe, a black-shouldered kite. How did you decide which natural image belonged to which moment in Eve's story?

I always wanted the natural world to inform and contain this story, and it felt fitting to use chapter titles this way. In most cases, I pulled the titles from the events of the chapter, like the examples you’ve used in the question, but in some cases, I chose things for the metaphorical weight they carried. Stick Insects, for example, are precisely what the name describes–insects that take on the characteristics of the sticks in their environment for camouflage–and this is how I pictured young Eve, with skinny legs and nobbly knees, and so at home in her environment that she’s an indelible part of it.

The Light Remains sits at a rich intersection of literary fiction, vivid place writing, historical fiction, deep female interiority, and romance. Writers like Delia Owens, KJ Kelly, Clare Leslie Hall, and Shelley Read have worked in similar territory. Who do you consider your companions in that tradition, and which writers shaped your approach to this novel? 

I’d be happy for The Light Remains to be considered as a contemporary of any of these writers and as part of any literary tradition that includes women characters with strong interior worlds. During my studies, I wrote a thesis on Nadine Gordimer’s fiction and read most of her novels and many of her short stories. I admire how she confronted the tragedy of Apartheid in her fiction by showing the truth and thereby allowing the society in which it thrived to reveal itself. Similarly, writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Sindiwe Magona (a South African novelist refered to as a "conscience for the nation") hold a mirror up to society, warts and all. I hope to emulate this kind of honesty in my own work. There are so many women writers I read and admire and hope I’ve absorbed something from them all: Barbara Kingsolver’s close attention to the natural world, Virginia Woolf’s rich interiority and clear female perspective, Claire Keegan’s spare use of language and specificity of character. 

The imagery of light is woven throughout the novel, and the title itself comes from Eve's father explaining how "the light remains, even when it cannot be seen." What made you decide to develop that motif and have it at the heart of the story? 

The title was inspired at first by the scene you reference, which describes how light shows up as crepuscular rays after some unsettlement or disruption in the air, like a rainstorm or dust. The metaphor contained in this description suggests that it’s at the hardest times in life that hope, or love, or support, is revealed. I suppose a literary take on this might be the Leonard Cohen lyric from his song Anthem: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.” Honestly, I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to develop the motif; I just think the idea is at the heart of the story and came through in the telling. Life can be hard, and there can be suffering, but at the same time, there is always love and hope. A hand reaching out to lift you up. Even when we can’t see it.

Eve and Kate are described in deliberate contrast — Kate "gentle, sweet, never-any-trouble," Eve tomboyish enough to be nicknamed "Johnny." How did you ensure both characters remained fully realized rather than simply foils for each other?

Character development is a very important part of any story for me. I want all my characters to be multi-dimensional and recognizable as human (flawed, gifted, unique) not caricatures. In my mind, these two girls who become women in the story are very distinct people, and I hope I was convincingly able to develop them as separate but connected. Kate and Eve are opposites in many ways, but also sisters, linked by experience and family and a sincere affection, but I needed their differences to make sense in the choices they are forced to make. Kate is more accepting and resigned to her lot, where Eve is always going to fight harder for what she loves. The twist in this story is when Eve has to choose between two things she loves deeply and must sacrifice her own needs in the choosing.

The novel is rich with female interiority — tracing the inner lives of women across generations, relationships, and circumstances. How did you access that kind of deep female interiority across such different characters, and were there women in any of these characters that you recognized from your own life?

I did borrow some things from life, but mainly experiences, not people. Eve and Kate are named after my grandmother and her sister—Evelyn and Kathleen Hunter—but not based on those women. The interiority and multi-dimensional nature of women is completely fascinating to me, mostly because I have so many amazing, thoughtful, intelligent women in my life, but also because women are often reduced (in life and in literature) to silent stereotypes. It was important to me to write about women in this book, and in all my writing actually, who have dimension and richness and have made decisions, both good and bad, that reflect them, not some idea of how women should be.  

The political reality of apartheid is present throughout — in the background of the funeral, in store doorways marked Whites Only and Non-Whites, in newspaper headlines about the Sharpeville massacre. How did you approach weaving the political reality of apartheid into a story that is, at its core, so deeply personal and intimate? 

It would be impossible to tell a story set in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, without including the context of Apartheid, which was woven through every aspect of life—both public and private. This story is about a white South African family with colonial roots and a deep connection to the land on which they lived and farmed. They were beneficiaries of the system, which was based on white supremacy. I only had to show what their lives were like and provide a bit of historical context to reveal the presence of Apartheid.

The novel is filled with vivid, specific South African language and culture — terms like soutie, the klap, the landscape of the Lowveld. You grew up in South Africa but completed this novel in Connecticut. How did physical and temporal distance affect the writing?

Honestly, I didn’t feel any physical distance from place while writing The Light Remains. The story is set in the past, during an era I never experienced, but I always had an intimate sense of my characters, especially Eve, and where she stood in time and space. I experienced most of what I wrote as if it was a memory, not a new creation, and while working on the scenes, I wasn’t ever aware of my distance from South Africa and the farm. It’s been many years since I lived in South Africa, but I visit as often as I can, and still feel a strong connection to the country. The biggest responsibility I felt about setting the novel in South Africa was that I wanted to get the details right, and do right by the people who lived there.

The Light Remains is your debut novel, though you have a strong background in short fiction. How did the demands of the novel form differ from what you were used to, and what surprised you most about the process?

At the same time as I was writing and publishing short stories, I was working on this novel. I didn’t come to the novel via short story or vice versa, so it’s hard for me to separate the demands of the two forms. In some ways, writing short stories feels more like play. I don’t want to be flippant, because it’s hard to write a good short story, but you’re less invested in the threat of failure because it’s less of a time commitment. Writing and completing a short story feels very creative to me, and of course, publication can come easier because you can finish a short story faster, and you don’t need an agent or a publisher to send it out into the world. There are so many good literary journals looking for content, so the turnaround can be more rewarding. On the other hand, writing this novel felt like a very long and uphill learning experience. After the initial creativity, I got mired in editing. I mistrusted myself more. I second guessed myself, my ability, and the story, which I wrote and rewrote and revised so often, changing the plot multiple times before I settled on this final version. The biggest surprise was how long it took, but also that I stuck with it. I read or heard a quote somewhere along the way that said, “The only writer who fails is the one who gives up.” I don’t have an attribution, but it’s something I muttered to myself many, many times through the years. 

What do you hope remains with readers once they finish the book?

The desire to read more books. Especially to read books written by people you’ll never meet, from places you’ve never visited. We could all benefit from glimpses into one another’s lives. I think by seeing the particulars of other people’s lives, we see there is universality in the human experience. That we have more in common than we might believe.