Carolyn Slaughter is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels,
but for the last twelve years she has been completely silent. She had
become conscious that there was something hidden in her past that had
always haunted her fiction but which she had never fully faced. This
powerful memoir is the result of confronting the truth about her
traumatic childhood.
Carolyn's father was in the colonial service, but he lacked power
and was ashamed of his Irish origins. In private, he was capable of
acts of absolute sadism. When Carolyn was small, they lived
comfortably in Swaziland having left India during the Partition. But
when she turned six, things changed. Her mother gave birth to another
daughter and they were posted to a remote area in the Kalahari desert.
Bereft of a civilized social life, her mother plunged into a deep
depression and turned completely away from Carolyn. While her older
sister found friends and left for boarding school, Carolyn suffered a
desperate sense of abandonment and loss and turned to the landscape of
the Kalahari itself for solace.
The stark fact that Carolyn was first raped by her father at the age
of six is contained within the prologue and epilogue of this book.
What lies in between is the story of an extraordinary childhood in
Africa and a moving depiction of the complexities at the root of our
relationships with mother, father, siblings. Despite its sometimes
harrowing contents, it is a work of great, dangerous beauty.
Carolyn Slaughter's first novel, The Story of the Weasel, won the
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She followed it with nine further novels,
including Dreams of the Kalahari and The Innocents. She now lives in
America and works as a psychotherapist. She is at work on a novel set in
India.
