"Set in a version of Cape Town in the years after the First World War, this sure-handed, gothic-tinged novel tells the story of Soraya, a young Muslim woman who works as a live-in housekeeper for an elderly English widow. Soraya has "a fanciful mind" and is able to see ghosts and communicate with spirits, including previous domestic workers. Much of her time is spent preparing the house, "a strange place full of fright,""
"This novel, the first of the undersung writer's books to appear in English, opens in 1946, just as winter is descending on Milan. An extended family of nine is preparing to hunker down in an attic apartment, a dilapidated space "divided up with curtains and partitions." Though they share tight quarters, the family members-siblings, cousins, in-laws-are all preoccupied by disparate fixations."
Cape Fever follows Soraya, a young Muslim housekeeper in post–World War I Cape Town who sees ghosts and communicates with previous domestic workers. She readies an elderly English widow's fright-filled house while awaiting a repeatedly postponed visit from the widow's war-veteran son. The widow's offer to write letters for Soraya to her fiancé becomes a tool of control that culminates explosively. A Very Cold Winter unfolds in 1946 Milan as nine relatives share a curtained attic; an omniscient narrator traces competing ambitions and the difficulty of moving on after war. A memoir begins during the March 2020 Covid lockdown, centering on divorce within privileged family circles.
Read at The New Yorker
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