Sacrificed
SACRIFICED

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ISBN 978-1-946395-00-9 | paperback | $16.95 | publication date Oct 2017

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The U.S. debut of bestselling South African writer Chanette Paul, translated from Afrikaans (trans. Elsa Silke). Rejected by her parents, sister, husband, everyone except her extraordinary and unusual daughter, Caz Colijn lives a secluded life in her own little patch of Africa. But a single phone call from her estranged sister shatters her refuge. Caz learns that her elderly mother is on her deathbed in Belgium—and that the old woman isn’t really Caz’s biological mother. This phone call is just the first step down an ever-widening tunnel into Caz’s painful past.Jetting between Belgium and Africa, she’s desperate to learn who her biological parents are, why they gave her away, and whether this has anything to do with her daughter’s exceptional nature: she is black, born to two white parents during the period of apartheid. Caz is so caught up in discovering the truth about the past, she almost doesn’t notice the man who is falling in love with her. Or the meaning behind the key she receives. Or the two Congolese men who are following her every move in search for something they’re willing to kill for. From the Congo’s sparkling diamond mines to Belgium’s finest art galleries, from Africa’s civil unrest to its deeply spiritual roots, Sacrificed seamlessly crosses borders and decades with a fiercely captivating story.
Reviews

“Caz Colijn’s search for the truth about her troubled past illuminates South Africa’s struggle for wholeness in the wake of its bloody history. Here is novel that is brutal yet tender and even lyrical. Read it and weep.” —Yona Zeldis McDonough, The House on Primrose Pond

“Chanette is certainly one of the supplest voices in Afrikaans … an exceptional and gutsy story …”—Wilna Adriaanse, South African novelist

“[A] page-turner that will keep you reading long past the moment the midnight oil burns out … Sacrificed places Chanette Paul among the classiest thriller writers of our day.” —Janet Levine, New York Journal of Books

About Chanette Paul

Chanette Paul has published 41 best-selling romance, thriller and crime novels in her native Afrikaans in South Africa. This is her first book translated into English.

In describing the story behind the story of Sacrificed, Chanette says, “I wanted to convey what it is like to be a South African living in the post-apartheid era. South Africa has never been an easy country to live in. Colonialism has left deep, ugly scars, including ongoing racism and other consequences of apartheid. It is a boil on the verge of bursting. I wanted to convey all of that, but first and foremost I wanted to tell an entertaining, suspenseful story.”

 

About Elsa Silke

Elsa Silke grew up in Simondium, a village near Paarl in the Western Cape province of South Africa. She studied for a BA at the University of Stellenbosch, majoring in English and French. She later returned to the University of Stellenbosch for an honors degree in English and in 2004 was awarded a master’s degree in translation. Since then she has been working as a freelance editor and translator, chiefly of literary texts. She is a four-time winner of a South African Translators’ Institute prize for outstanding translation, each time in a different category or language combination: the fiction category in 2006 for Karel Schoeman’s This Life; the nonfiction category in 2009 for Chris Karsten’s Charlize: Life’s One Helluva Ride; the children’s literature category in 2012 for Linda Rode’s In the Never-Ever Wood; and the fiction category in 2015 for Paula Marais’s Shadow Self. She has two sons, a daughter, and five grandchildren, and she and her husband live in the Strand.