Imaginings of Sand (PB) (1999)

When expatriate Afrikaner Kristien Müller hears of her grandmother's impending death, she ends her self-imposed exile in London and returns to the South Africa she thought she'd escaped. But irrevocable change is sweeping the land, and reality itself seems to be in flux as the country stages its first democratic elections. Kristien's Ouma Kristina herself is dying because of the upheavals: a terrorist attack on her isolated mansion has terminally injured her. As Kristien keeps vigil by her grandmother's sickbed, Ouma tells Kristien stories of nine generations of women in the family, stories in which myth and reality blur, in which legend and brute fact are confused, in which magic, treachery, farce, and heroism are the stuff of the day-to-day. Imaginings of Sand is the passionate tale of a nation discovering itself and of the women who pioneered that discovery.